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pomt-11519 | 3 American women are murdered every day by their husband or boyfriend. | mostly true | /california/statements/2018/feb/19/jackie-speier/fact-checking-sad-statistic-number-women-murdered-/ | The resignation of two White House aides accused of physically abusing their wives has shone a brighter spotlight on the scourge of domestic violence. President Trump, who initially praised the work of one of the aides and wished him well, said one week after that he is "totally opposed to domestic violence." Meanwhile, California Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat who represents the San Francisco area, weighed in through Twitter with an alarming statement: "3 American women are murdered every day by their husband or boyfriend." Domestic violence plagues all corners of the United States, no matter a community’s political leanings, economic status or demographic make-up. Still, we wanted to know whether the congresswoman’s provocative claim was accurate and what source of information she relied on. We set out to fact check Speier’s sad statistic. Our research Rep. Speier, a survivor of gun violence, has been a strong voice for gun control and for stopping sexual assaults. Her spokeswoman pointed us to an NBC news article which says "nearly three women are murdered every day in the U.S. by current or former romantic partners." That’s slightly different from the congresswoman’s tweet, which did not specify former partners. But it’s fairly close. The NBC article cited data from a 2017 Violence Policy Center report called When Men Murder Women. Representatives at the policy center could not be reached for comment. After examining the report, we found it somewhat supports Speier’s statement, with a few caveats. It analyzed 2015 homicide data collected by the FBI. It found 928 female homicide victims were "wives or intimate acquaintances of their killers." That works out to 2.54 female victims killed by an intimate partner on average per day in the United States. While Speier stated "women," ages were not specified in the report. The report, which is the most complete and current we could find, indicates the assailants were not just husbands or boyfriends, but also ex-spouses and former boyfriends. Common claim Several domestic violence prevention groups have cited the same "three women murdered" figure on their websites. At least two of these, the National Organization for Women and the American Psychological Association, cited data that’s a decade or more older from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an office at the U.S. Department of Justice. The National Organization for Women, for example, cited federal statistics from 2005 that show, on average, about 3.2 women were killed per day by an intimate partner in the United States. Shari Miles-Cohen, senior director of the Women’s Programs Office at the American Psychological Association, said the statistic dates to a 2003 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, but also matches with more recent homicide findings, including from 2013. Missing data We found a note of caution in a 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report on female homicides by intimate partners. It warned that the relationship between the killer and homicide victim was unknown for anywhere from a quarter to a third of the homicides in any given year. That’s because an offender was not identified or apprehended, according to the report, which examined the years 1993 through 2010. Given that missing data, one could speculate the actual number of women and girls killed through the years by intimate partners would be marginally higher. No matter which report is examined, Gretchen Shaw, associate director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said domestic abuse is all too prevalent and deadly in the United States. "It’s much more common than people ever realize," Shaw said. Our ruling Speier said in a tweet that "3 American women are murdered every day by their husband or boyfriend." Several domestic violence prevention groups make the same claim on their websites, though they cite data that in some cases is a decade old. We examined an analysis of 2015 homicide data by the Violence Prevention Center, and found that about 2.5 females were killed, on average, by an intimate partner each day in the United States. Speier’s statement could have clarified that assailants include former intimate partners, as well as current ones. Also, her tweet references women, though the victims likely include some teenages. Finally, we found a 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report that cautions the relationship between female homicide victims and their killers is unknown in as many as one third of the cases. This makes the actual number of women killed by intimate partners difficult to determine. One could argue the tally is higher than the studies show. We found Speier’s claim is on the right track, but could have used a few clarifications. We rate it Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Jackie Speier | null | null | null | 2018-02-19T13:04:05 | 2018-02-10 | ['United_States'] |
goop-01937 | Prince William Wore Red Wig To Mock Prince Harry At Palace Event? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/prince-william-red-wig-mock-harry/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Prince William Wore Red Wig To Mock Prince Harry At Palace Event? | 2:34 am, January 1, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06242 | For "the average middle-class family, your taxes today are lower than when I took office." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/dec/01/barack-obama/obama-says-taxes-lower-middle-class/ | During a Nov. 30, 2011, speech in Scranton, Pa., President Barack Obama urged Congress to extend a payroll tax cut. He used the platform to try to change perceptions about his stance on taxes. "Now, I know you hear a lot of folks on cable TV claiming that I’m this big tax-and-spend liberal," Obama said. "Next time you hear that, you just remind the people who are saying it that since I’ve taken office, I’ve cut your taxes. … The average middle-class family, your taxes today are lower than when I took office, just remember that. We have cut taxes for small businesses not once, not twice, but 17 times. The average family’s tax burden is among the lowest it’s been in the last 60 years. So the problem is not that we’ve been raising taxes. We’ve actually been trying to give families a break during these tough times." A couple readers asked us to check this item. One wrote us, "I've seen conservative reactions ranging from, ‘I laughed out loud’ to ‘What a comedian!’" So we decided to take a look. We’ve addressed two of these claims in previous items -- the one about small business tax cuts (rating it Mostly True) and the one about the tax burden being the lowest in 60 years (rating it Mostly True). So in this item, we’re only analyzing Obama’s claim that for "the average middle-class family, your taxes today are lower than when I took office." First, let’s recap some background about the tax, and the tax cut, that Obama was touting in Scranton. The payroll tax refers to federal taxes taken directly from the paychecks of employed Americans. It is primarily used to fund Social Security and Medicare. For two decades, the payroll tax meant a 6.2 percent deduction on annual earnings for most workers. There were limits to the total amount individuals could be required to pay. In 2009 and 2010, the levy applied to the first $106,800 of salary, meaning no one would pay more than $6,621. Employers paid a matching share. In December 2010, the levy was cut to 4.2 percent for workers as part of an agreement Obama worked out with Congress to extend income tax reductions passed during President George W. Bush’s administration. The payroll tax reduction is in effect for the duration of 2011. But in his American Jobs Act, Obama proposed slicing the payroll to 3.1 percent for workers next year. (To help employers, the president also proposed a 50 percent tax cut in the first $5 million of payroll costs for most small businesses.) Obama has also enacted some other tax cuts while in office, including the American Opportunity Tax Credit for tuition and other educational fees and expansions of the existing Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit. He’s also raised some taxes (or didn’t stop them from going up), but these hikes aren’t as relevant for judging his statement in Scranton. Some of the tax hikes haven’t taken effect yet, like a few in the health care bill, so these wouldn’t be a factor in judging the statement that for "the average middle-class family, your taxes today are lower than when I took office." Other tax increases affect only very wealthy taxpayers. Two taxes would be relevant for this calculation. Obama signed legislation raising taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products soon after taking office; that money goes to pay for children's health insurance programs. The law went into effect in 2009. He also signed the health care law, which includes taxes on indoor tanning that went into effect last year. It’s hard to tell exactly who’s footing the burden for these taxes. However, cigarette and tanning taxes account for a relatively small share of all federal taxes (and zero for people who don’t use either of them). The broadest analyses we’ve seen are the tax analyses produced by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, an independent research organization. We looked at the group’s estimate of what tax burden is borne by Americans of different income levels. The group calculates the average federal tax burden and the average federal tax rate for five quintiles of U.S. households -- or 20-percent groupings, from the top of the income scale to the bottom. These figures include the federal income tax, payroll taxes, and estate taxes, though not federal excise taxes or corporate taxes. (The tax rate figure is the "effective" tax rate -- how much the average taxpayer ultimately pays as a percentage of their cash income. It’s not a "tax bracket," which refers to the income tax rate paid on a taxpayer’s final dollar of income.) To come up with a definition of "middle class," we ignored the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent and focused on the three segments of 20 percent each in the middle of the income distribution. We used the tax data for 2008 and for 2011. So how do the numbers look? Here’s the summary. Second-lowest 20 percent 2008 tax burden: $1,715 2011 tax burden: $1,396 Decline of $319 2008 tax rate: 6.7 percent 2011 tax rate: 5.7 percent Decline of 1 percentage point Middle 20 percent 2008 tax burden: $6,290 2011 tax burden: $5,535 Decline of $775 2008 tax rate: 13.6 percent 2011 tax rate: 12.4 percent Decline of 1.2 percentage points Second-highest 20 percent 2008 tax burden: $13,749 2011 tax burden: $13,078 Decline of $671 2008 tax rate: 17.4 percent 2011 tax rate: 16.5 percent Decline of 0.9 percentage points So for each of the three middle quintiles, both the amount of tax paid and the effective tax rate paid declined. Our ruling Every taxpayer is different, and some "middle-class" Americans may have seen their tax rate or their tax burden go up for one reason or another. But Obama was talking about "the average middle-class family." The changes to the tax code made under Obama and the analyses by the Tax Policy Center show that for the middle 60 percent of the income distribution, both the average tax paid and the average tax rate fell between 2008 and 2011. We rate Obama’s statement True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2011-12-01T15:38:11 | 2011-11-30 | ['None'] |
pomt-10738 | Obama "refused to not only put his hand on his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, but refused to say the pledge." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/nov/08/chain-email/photo-was-taken-during-anthem-not-pledge/ | A chain e-mail says a photograph shows Barack Obama is unpatriotic because he "refused" to say the Pledge of Allegiance and did not put his hand over his heart. In the photograph, Barack Obama is standing in front of an American flag with his hands clasped just below his waist. Beside him are Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton, with their hands on their hearts. The e-mail notes that Obama's middle name is "Hussein" and says he "REFUSED TO NOT ONLY PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEART DURING THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, BUT REFUSED TO SAY THE PLEDGE.....how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next Commander-in-Chief????" But the Time magazine photograph wasn't taken during the Pledge of Allegiance; it was taken during the singing of the Star-Spangled Banner. The Obama photo was taken Sept. 16 in Indianola, Iowa, at the Harkin Steak Fry, an annual political event hosted by U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin. The caption on the Time photo says Obama and the others "stand during the national anthem." Matt Paul, an organizer of the event, and a video from ABC News confirm that the photo was taken as someone sang the Star-Spangled Banner . Oddly, the accurate caption from Time is included in the chain e-mail. But someone has added that "the article said" Obama refused to say the pledge and would not put his hand on his heart. There is no such article on the Time Web site, and searches of the Web and newspaper/magazine databases could only find blog postings that repeat the claim from the e-mail. So it's unclear where the allegation originated. Obama said the e-mail was false and that the picture was taken during the anthem. "My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was 2," Obama said at campaign stop in Burlington, Iowa. "During the Pledge of Allegiance you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem you sing." He called the e-mail "irritating" and likened it to others that have falsely said he is a Muslim. The photo has stirred up such a fuss that on Wednesday night the Obama campaign released a letter of support from retired military leaders. "Senator Obama's attackers are peddling lies and smears because they disagree with his strong opposition to the war in Iraq and the rush to war in Iran," wrote Richard Danzig, secretary of the Navy under President Clinton, and retired Gens. Merrill "Tony" McPeak and J. Scott Gration. "We have served this nation for decades, and we know a true patriot when we see one. Barack Obama is a patriot." The photo has also spawned a debate about whether Obama's conduct was proper for the national anthem. Conservative bloggers have pointed out that the federal law for "patriotic and national observances" says that during the Star-Spangled Banner , "all present except those in uniform should stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart; men not in uniform should remove their headdress with their right hand and hold the headdress at the left shoulder, the hand being over the heart." Experts on the national anthem say the law seems a bit out of date, given its reference to a man's "headdress." Yet it's still cited in several military manuals found on the Web. Modern custom does not require a hand over the heart, said Anne Garside, director of communication for the Maryland Historical Society, home of the original manuscript of the Star-Spangled Banner . "I think the bottom line is that you show respect with your demeanor," she said. "Whether you put your hand over your heart, hold your hat at shoulder level or waist level, is really in this day and age irrelevant." She pointed out that "the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner was originally a drinking song. If they can put the words to the tune of a rousing drinking song, to quibble over whether you put your hand over your heart is really ridiculous." | null | Chain email | null | null | null | 2007-11-08T00:00:00 | 2007-11-08 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-13004 | Before Leaving, Obama Enacts Rules to Take $3,000 From EVERY American. | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2016/dec/14/conservative-tribune/conservative-website-exaggerates-misleads-post-reg/ | President Barack Obama is nearly out the door, but that hasn’t stopped the Internet from raising alarm bells about his policies. A recent post in a website called Conservative Tribune is headlined, "OUTRAGE: Before Leaving, Obama Enacts Rules to Take $3,000 From EVERY American." Other sites repeated this line, including Maine Republic Email Alert, Allen West, Young Conservatives, and Angry Patriot (which amped up the allegation by calling it "CORRUPT"). A reader asked us to delve deeper, so we did. (Conservative Tribune did not respond to an inquiry for this article.) It’s highly misleading. The article cites a Dec. 1, 2016, blog post titled, "Passing $1 Trillion," by the American Action Forum, a group that describes itself as "center-right" and "free-market." (Here’s some background on the group from our friends at FactCheck.org.) As a free-market group, reducing the regulatory burden is a core principle. So for years, the group has been tallying the costs of federal regulations, basing its work on the federal government’s own estimates of a regulation’s impact on both direct and indirect costs, including higher consumer prices, lower wages, and costs related to paperwork and other overhead. Late this year, the tally passed $1 trillion, which prompted the blog post in question. The $3,000 figure stems from the group’s calculation of $1 trillion in costs being spread out among the entire population. "On a per capita basis, there are 324 million people in the U.S., equating to a regulatory burden of $3,080 per person," wrote Sam Batkins, the group’s director of regulatory policy. So the $3,000 figure is based on a nugget of truth. But the Conservative Tribune, and other websites that shared similar headlines, framed the finding in a way that is significantly misleading. Here are five problems in the description. The $3,000-a-person figure For starters, some of the $1 trillion figure that this is based on stems from regulations imposed before Obama took office. The $1 trillion figure "tracked all net present value regulatory costs since 2005, so it includes the entire second half of the Bush administration," Batkins told PolitiFact. By our calculation, final rules under Obama alone accounted for $865 billion. That would produce a figure of $2,670 rather than $3,000. Not a dramatic difference, but one worth pointing out. And the annual cost of Obama’s regulations -- rather than the cumulative cost -- is a bit over $500 a person, according to the group’s calculations. That’s still substantial, but it’s not the wallop that $3,000 would be. The assertion that Obama did this "right before leaving" That’s not the case. This regulatory cost burden has been accumulating in fits and starts since more than a decade ago in 2005. In fact, the figure also includes regulatory costs that either "have been or will be imposed during the next few years," the blog post said. That means that "some of the costs might not be borne until the next decade," Batkins told PolitiFact. This would not hit "every" American, or all at once The headline phrase "take $3,000 from every U.S. citizen" makes it sound like people's taxes are going up $3,000 in one fell swoop. They are not. Rather, this amount would be drained over a long period of time and in myriad ways, with some people getting a bigger hit (by losing a job) and some a smaller hit (by having to pay a little more for products they buy). "It’s correct to say that regulations don’t act like taxes," Batkins said. "Many of the cost estimates take the form of higher prices for some consumer products, cars, air conditioners, and furnaces." This is an estimate, and it was calculated by a group with a perspective The headline does not make clear that these figures are estimates. The American Action Forum’s own post notes, "There is probably no one ‘correct answer’ on the cumulative costs of regulation. These figures are just estimates (unadjusted for inflation) from federal regulators, some more than a decade old, which might have dubious value." And as we’ve noted, the American Action Fund has a free-market orientation. Other groups with different perspectives may frame the statistics accordingly. This calculation leaves out all benefits from these regulations The American Action Forum mentions in its blog post that the government also calculates benefits that spring from these regulatory costs. "There are also benefits associated with many, but not all, of the largest regulations," Batkins told PolitiFact. All told, the group’s blog post says, "AAF recorded $745 billion in annual benefits during the same period." Benefits from regulations implemented under Obama include prevention of foodborne illnesses through inspection, consumer protection in the financial sector, flammability standards for consumer products, reduced energy use from conservation standards, cleaner air from emissions standards, air cargo security standards, oil-well blowout preventer systems and nuclear reactor safety standards, among many others. So, using both the cost and benefit figures, the net cost of regulations would work out to less than $800 a person -- still a net cost, but much smaller than the $3,000 figure cited in the headline. Ultimately, for the headline to cite just the costs but not the benefits amounts to cherry picking. Our ruling The Conservative Tribune published a post titled, "Before Leaving, Obama Enacts Rules to Take $3,000 From EVERY American," and other websites offered posts with similar headlines. The figure is based on a calculation from an anti-regulatory group, though we do give the conclusion some credence because the number is drawn from the federal government’s own estimates. However, the headline glosses over several important caveats. The costs were not solely imposed under Obama, and the ones that were on his watch occurred over an eight-year period, rather than just "before leaving" the White House. Finally, contrary to the headline’s implication, Americans will not be charged a $3,000 fee because of action taken in Obama’s final weeks. Rather, they would experience higher consumer costs or lower wages over many years, with a lot of variation from person to person, and going many years into the future. The calculation completely ignores the estimated benefits of these regulations, with a value that balances out about three-quarters of the cost figure cited. The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/85a69956-7bb7-4464-b30d-6d4e640eeab6 | null | Conservative Tribune | null | null | null | 2016-12-14T14:53:30 | 2016-12-02 | ['None'] |
pomt-10184 | Last week Senator Obama's running mate said, get this, 'Raising taxes is patriotic.' | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/sep/23/john-mccain/he-said-it-was-patriotic-to-pay-higher-taxes/ | Joe Biden may never live down his Sept. 18, 2008, comment on ABC's Good Morning America that wealthy Americans should act patriotically by paying more taxes. The Delaware senator and Democratic vice presidential nominee's remarks have proved a useful rallying cry for Republican nominee John McCain in painting Barack Obama as a tax-and-spend liberal. But that doesn't mean it's okay to distort the record, which is what McCain did during a Sept. 22 campaign rally in Reading, Pa., when he told an audience of supporters that "last week Senator Obama's running mate said, get this, 'Raising taxes is patriotic.' " Let's go to the transcript. Kate Snow, the ABC reporter conducting the interview with Biden, starts out discussing Obama's plan to roll back the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, effectively raising taxes on families making more than $250,000. Snow begins: "Anyone making over $250,000…" Biden finishes her thought: "… is going to pay more. It's time to be patriotic, time to jump in, time to be part of the deal, time to help get America out of the rut." Biden made the same point at a Sept. 3 town hall in Sarasota, Fla. One woman wondered what to tell friends who worry that an Obama-Biden victory will mean higher taxes. "It's time to be patriotic. That's what you say to them," Biden answered. It's a debatable argument Biden makes, but clearly he is not praising Obama's patriotism for planning to raise taxes. Rather he's invoking the patriotism of those wealthy taxpayers footing the bill. Still, McCain's twisting of Biden's words isn't totally off base, given that Biden brought up patriotism while justifying Obama's plan to raise taxes on some wealthy Americans. We rule McCain's claim Barely True. Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False. | null | John McCain | null | null | null | 2008-09-23T00:00:00 | 2008-09-22 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
goop-01790 | Meghan Markle Did Give Prince William “Extra Push” To Shave Head, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-prince-william-shaved-head-made-up/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Meghan Markle Did NOT Give Prince William “Extra Push” To Shave Head, Despite Report | 4:12 am, January 19, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
chct-00246 | FACT CHECK: Will The Trump Family Save $1 Billion Under The GOP Tax Plan? | verdict: false | http://checkyourfact.com/2017/12/22/fact-check-will-the-trump-family-save-1-billion-under-the-gop-tax-plan/ | null | null | null | Kush Desai | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 10:37 PM 12/22/2017 | null | ['None'] |
chct-00271 | FACT CHECK: Could The Senate Kick Out Roy Moore If He Gets Elected? | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2017/11/13/fact-check-could-the-senate-kick-out-roy-moore-if-he-gets-elected/ | null | null | null | David Sivak | Fact Check Editor | null | null | 5:13 PM 11/13/2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05309 | Gov. Scott Walker is helping pay for the criminal defense of a man accused of "boy rape." | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2012/may/18/graeme-zielinski/wisconsin-democratic-party-spokesman-zielinski-say/ | On May 15, Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesman Graeme Zielinski sent out dozens of tweets to his 1,423 followers. The tweets had a recurring theme: Republican Gov. Scott Walker is using his criminal defense fund to help defend a man accused of child sexual enticement. Among the nearly 20 tweets on the subject that day, many were framed as rhetorical questions, such as "DEAR WISCONSIN: Your Governor, @GovWalker, may be bankrolling the criminal defense of a top @WisGOP who tried to rape underage boys." The most jarring message was this one: "@MarkBellingShow, @JerryBaderShow, liar@SykesCharlie, @VickiMcKenna-you guys shud hold fundraiser 4 @GovWalker defense of boy rape." The tweet, in which Zielinski attempts to draw several conservative radio talk show hosts into the fray, flatly states Walker is defending someone accused of a sex assault involving a child. Indeed, the way it was stated it could be read as if Walker has taken a broader position in defense of "boy rape." Wow. We’ll need more than 140 characters to put this one in context: What has happened so far Walker established a criminal defense fund in early 2012 in response to a John Doe criminal investigation by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm into the actions of former Walker aides when he was Milwaukee county executive. In April 2012, Walker transferred $60,000 from his campaign account into the defense fund. As of May 2012, five people have been charged in the probe, which is ongoing. Walker’s June 5, 2012, recall opponent, Democrat Tom Barrett, and the state Democratic Party have demanded that Walker explain more about his role in the investigation, which is done in a cloak of secrecy -- hence the name, John Doe. They want to know why he established the fund, and what and who the money is being used for. It is unclear if Walker has testified, but if he had he’d be precluded from saying so under the rules. Among those facing charges is Brian Pierick of Sun Prairie, who was charged with two felonies -- child enticement and exposing his genitals -- in connection with text messages he allegedly exchanged with a 17-year-old Waukesha boy in 2010. Pierick has pleaded not guilty. Pierick was not a paid Walker aide, but at one point was listed as the official registrant for the Walker campaign’s website. Pierick was an office assistant at the state Department of Public Instruction dealing with education for homeless children and youth. He was fired from the civil service position shortly after he was arrested. Pierick is the domestic partner and business partner of Timothy Russell, who was a top aide to Walker when he was county executive. Russell has pleaded not guilty to two felony charges of embezzling $23,000 from a veterans group and a political candidate. A criminal complaint says Pierick was acting with a co-conspirator in attempting to lure a 17-year-old into Russell's van for a sexual encounter. The complaint says Russell and Pierick used the screen name "Walker04" to procure online porn involving young boys. In his tweets, Zielinski again and again links Walker to Pierick and the sex crimes charges. But they were not what prompted the investigation. Prosecutors came across them as they were looking into the embezzlement allegations. We asked Zielinski to explain the claim that Walker was helping with Pierick’s defense on the sex crimes charges. He responded via email: "The criminal complaint against Brian Pierick, who is a known associate of Scott Walker and a campaign functionary as well, alleges serious crimes. It is a serious and legitimate question for Scott Walker to answer -- is he paying for the criminal defense of a man accused of these serious crimes." But that’s not what Zielinski said. His tweet claimed Walker is raising money to defend Pierick. And Zielinski provided no evidence of that. Walker has not responded to questions about how or for whom he is using the defense fund. Walker spokesman Ciara Matthews had no comment about Zielinski’s tweets. What the law says State law says candidates can establish a criminal defense fund and that the money can be used for "expenditures supporting or defending the candidate or agent, or any dependent of the candidate or agent, while that person is being investigated for, or while the person is charged with or convicted of a criminal violation" of campaign laws. Kevin Kennedy, director and general counsel for the state Government Accountability Board, said state law was vague about who would be considered an "agent." "An agent is a very broad term," he said. "It becomes a question of fact which people can debate endlessly." Kennedy said he was not able to discuss specifics about the establishment of the Walker defense fund. Walker is not required to publicly disclose how or on whom the fund is spent, he said. The broad definition of an "agent, or a dependent, could be argued to Pierick. But that doesn’t mean Walker has spent anything to help him. And the same same could apply to literally hundreds of people. At no point has the governor defended Pierick or given any indication that he is coming to Pierick’s defense. Pierick is charged with two felony sex crimes involving underage males -- not campaign law or government work violations. And he’s hardly a "top Republican," as described by Zielinski in one tweet Pierick’s lawyer, Maura McMahon, is with the state public defender’s office -- paid for by taxpayers because the court has determined that Pierick can’t afford to pay a private lawyer. No obvious Walker defense help there. The Zielinski tweets are loaded with innuendo that’s not supported in any way. He’s using social media shorthand in a brazen effort to link Walker to defending Pierick amid the allegations of sex crimes. He suggests or imply that the governor supports or defends "boy rape." Repeated postings with variations on the same theme are meant to stir attention, with the hope that others will repeat and retweet the claim, and that it will show up in searches. In this case, what’s being recycled is a hot, ridiculous mess … which we call Pants on Fire. (You can comment on this item on the Journal Sentinel's website.) | null | Graeme Zielinski | null | null | null | 2012-05-18T10:59:12 | 2012-05-15 | ['None'] |
pomt-00709 | Eighty-five percent of every dollar donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up either with the Clintons or with their staff to pay for travel, salaries, and benefits. Fifteen cents of every dollar actually went to some charitable beneficiary. | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2015/apr/29/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-says-clinton-foundation-spends-just-/ | Much of the discussion about the Clinton family foundation has focused on who donated to it and what they may have expected in return from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But critics of the Clintons have opened up another line of attack on what is formally known as the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, charging that it doesn’t actually spend very much on charitable works. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh aired this line of argument on April 23, 2015, citing a report in the Federalist, a conservative publication. Here’s a portion of what Limbaugh said: "The Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation -- 99 percent pass-through. The Clinton Family Foundation pass-through is 15 percent. The Federalist reports only 15 percent of the money donated to the Clinton Family Foundation went to actual charitable causes. The bulk of the money donated to the Clinton Family Foundation went to travel, salaries, and benefits. Sixty percent of all the money raised went to other expenses. In other words, folks, 85 percent of every dollar donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up either with the Clintons or with their staff to pay for travel, salaries, and benefits. Fifteen cents of every dollar actually went to some charitable beneficiary." As this claim was circulating, the Clinton Foundation pushed back. The foundation tweeted, "More than 88% of our expenditures go directly to our life-changing work." The difference between 15 percent and 88 percent is wide, so we decided to check Limbaugh’s claim. A representative with Limbaugh’s radio network didn’t answer an email inquiry. An unusual approach for a foundation When most people in the charitable world think of foundations, they think of organizations that give away a lot of money in the form of grants to others who go out and do good works. The Clinton foundation works differently -- it keeps its money in house and hires staff to carry out its own humanitarian programs. This set-up means the Clinton foundation’s finances get complicated in ways other foundations do not. Partly because of that, one of the leading independent groups that track charities -- Charity Navigator -- has been flummoxed about how to analyze that foundation and has stopped rating it, at least for now. Charity Navigator says it has "determined that this charity's atypical business model cannot be accurately captured in our current rating methodology. Our removal of The Clinton Foundation from our site is neither a condemnation nor an endorsement of this charity. We reserve the right to reinstate a rating for The Clinton Foundation as soon as we identify a rating methodology that appropriately captures its business model." What is counted in the foundation’s financials? The Federalist article that Limbaugh cited dug into the Clinton foundation’s tax forms known as 990s, which nonprofits have to file annually with the Internal Revenue Service. Here’s an excerpt from the Federalist article: "When anyone contributes to the Clinton Foundation, it actually goes toward fat salaries, administrative bloat, and lavish travel. Between 2009 and 2012, the Clinton Foundation raised over $500 million dollars according to a review of IRS documents by The Federalist (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008). A measly 15 percent of that, or $75 million, went towards programmatic grants. More than $25 million went to fund travel expenses. Nearly $110 million went toward employee salaries and benefits. And a whopping $290 million during that period — nearly 60 percent of all money raised — was classified merely as ‘other expenses.’ " The Clinton foundation, on the other hand, gets to its 88 percent going to "life-changing work" by combining the finances of the Clinton Foundation and an affiliated organization, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, that before 2010 had been part of the Clinton Foundation proper. The Clinton Health Access Initiative works with governments and private groups to lower the costs of treatment for HIV/AIDS in the developing world. The Clinton Health Access Initiative was split off from the foundation because "they got so big they needed their own organization to do it," said Craig Minassian, a spokesman for the foundation, in an interview with PolitiFact. But in putting together its annual report for 2013, the Clinton Foundation folded together both groups before calculating the numbers. Some question the logic for doing it this way. "Clinton allies are deliberately conflating the activities and finances of multiple independent nonprofit organizations and hoping you'll view everything together as ‘The Clinton Foundation,’ " Sean Davis, who wrote the Federalist story, told PunditFactc. "That's just not the case, though." The correct number for the Clinton Foundation alone -- which owned the account the tweet was sent from -- was just over 80 percent in 2013, not 88 percent. The Clinton Foundation’s unusual model As we noted earlier, many foundations carry out charitable works by giving money to other organizations that, in turn, do the ground-level charity work, whereas the Clinton foundation’s charitable works are mostly done by people on the foundation’s payroll. "We are an implementing organization rather than a grantmaking organization," said the foundation’s Minassian. That’s why the Clinton Foundation’s 990s show a relatively small amount of money categorized as "grants" -- only about 10 percent of all expenses in 2013. The foundation says its own employees are doing its charitable work. The annual report -- which, remember, includes both the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Health Access Initiative -- says that 7 percent of expenditures were spent on "management and expenses" and 4.5 percent for "fundraising." (The numbers on the 990s for the two entities are in the same ballpark.) Add those two percentages together and you get almost 12 percent; subtract that from 100 percent and you get the magic 88 percent figure the foundation cited. An independent academic CPA who specializes in nonprofit foundation finances said Limbaugh’s error was in assuming that all spending beyond grants amounted to wasteful overhead. "When Mr. Limbaugh says most of the spending is on salaries, travel, and other, that is not particularly informative," said Linda Parsons, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Alabama's Culverhouse College of Commerce. "Travel and salaries for those who are directly carrying out the mission of the organization are much different than salaries and travel for executives who are networking in order to raise funds or for those who manage the organization. The response from the Clinton foundation that they carry out their missions directly, rather than outsource it to another organization or series of organizations, makes sense given that the Clinton Foundation reports travel, salaries, depreciation and conferences directly." Of course, Parsons’ interpretation depends on trusting the Clinton foundation’s characterization of its expenditures. As with any institution that files tax forms, the Clinton foundation has to characterize on its own what counts as "management" and what counts as spending on front-line charity work. The Federalist article says the foundation’s tweet exaggerates when it says money spent "directly" on "life-changing work," when in fact the group, by its own calculations, "spent nearly $8.5 million – 10 percent of all 2013 expenditures – on travel. Do plane tickets and hotel accommodations directly change lives? Nearly $4.8 million – 5.6 percent of all expenditures – was spent on office supplies. Are ink cartridges and staplers ‘life-changing’ commodities?" In response to a PolitiFact request, the Clinton Foundation said the expenditures for its programs are "inclusive of salaries for staff, large-scale conferences (which is how the foundation convenes partners to take action such as the Clinton Global Initiative and the Health Matters conference), training for farmers and other beneficiaries, as well as direct program expenses like purchasing seeds and fertilizer for our agricultural programs and medical equipment for our public health work." Reasonable people can disagree about how to categorize expenses, said Janet S. Greenlee, emeritus professor of accounting at the University of Dayton business school. "There is no approved, required, or suggested method for allocating costs between program and nonprogram spending, so two charities that have the same financial events may have totally different financials," Greenlee said. "Limbaugh is saying everything that’s not direct service must be a waste of money, while the foundation is probably estimating that most of its other costs are actually direct service and so are accounted as such. The ‘truth,’ if there is such a thing, is somewhere in between." The foundation sent PolitiFact a rough geographic breakdown for program spending in 2012 and 2013. It cited expenditures split between 66.2 percent for the United States, 18.1 percent for South America, 5.6 percent for Southeast Asia, 4.9 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa, 3.6 percent for Central America and the Caribbean, 1.2 percent for West and Central Africa and 0.4 percent for Mexico. That’s more than we had expected to see in domestic spending -- we’re checking with the foundation on why that was so high, and will report their explanation if we receive one -- but even if the foundation devoted as little as one-third of its expenses to programs outside the U.S., then Limbaugh’s 15 percent estimate would be too low. To offer some context, spending 88 percent of expenses on charitable programs, as the Clinton foundation says it does, would actually be pretty good by industry standards. Parsons said the average reported across all organizations in the National Center for Charitable Statistics is 81 percent -- equal to the Clinton Foundation’s rate on its own -- and the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance suggests a minimum of 65 percent. "The foundation exceeds that," Parsons said. Our ruling Limbaugh said "85 percent of every dollar donated to the Clinton Foundation ended up either with the Clintons or with their staff to pay for travel, salaries, and benefits. Fifteen cents of every dollar actually went to some charitable beneficiary." There’s a grain of truth here -- roughly 85 percent of the foundation’s spending was for items other than charitable grants to other organizations, and a large chunk of this 85 percent did go to Clinton Foundation staff for travel, salaries and benefits. However, the foundation says it does most of its charitable work in-house, and it’s not credible to think that the foundation spent zero dollars beyond grants on any charitable work, which is what it would take for Limbaugh to be correct. The claim contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False. | null | Rush Limbaugh | null | null | null | 2015-04-29T11:40:48 | 2015-04-23 | ['Bill_Clinton', 'Clinton_Foundation'] |
pomt-02523 | John Cornyn "voted twice in 2013 to back Obama’s amnesty plan." | pants on fire! | /texas/statements/2014/feb/10/steve-stockman/john-cornyn-voted-against-leaderships-immigration-/ | A Republican primary challenger to John Cornyn said in an email blast Jan. 31, 2014, that the senior senator for Texas is teaming with Barack Obama, the Democratic president, to "ram amnesty down your throat." U.S. Rep. Steve Stockman of Friendswood went on to say that no GOP leader is working harder for amnesty than Cornyn. More: "Last year Cornyn helped pass Obama’s amnesty bill in the Senate." We decided to check the to-the-point claim in the banner topping Stockman’s email: "John Cornyn voted twice in 2013 to back Obama’s amnesty plan." He did? We zeroed in on Cornyn’s votes, also exploring Obama’s connection to the plan. The legislation, which has yet to gain traction in the House, isn’t universally considered an amnesty scheme in part because it’s not as forgiving of immigrants lacking legal residency as the overhaul signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. In April 2013, our colleagues at PolitiFact in Washington, D.C., rated as Half True a claim that the legislation drafted by the Gang of 8 --four Senate Democrats and four Republicans intent on building a bipartisan coalition--was not an amnesty plan. The legislation did not offer blanket legal residency to unauthorized immigrants while it mandated fines, background checks and waiting periods, making it tougher than its 1986 predecessor. However, the proposal did afford a measure of clemency to those immigrants, who would not be required to return to their home countries. Our email to Stockman’s spokesman, Donny Ferguson, about Cornyn’s votes elicited no response. Cornyn’s campaign spokesman, Drew Brandewie, emailed us instances of Cornyn voting against the measure. Among substantive votes, Brandewie said, Cornyn voted against the measure when it cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee by 13-5 in May 2013, as noted in a news blog post by the Dallas Morning News on June 5, 2013, which also said that backers of the plan "had fended off many amendments" that Cornyn "authored or supported, including some to beef up enforcement or strip the path to citizenship for 11 million people" already estimated to be "in the country illegally." Cornyn’s "no" vote in committee, on May 21, 2013, wasn’t his last. On June 27, 2013, the Senate sent the House an immigration proposal "that would allow millions of illegal immigrants the chance to live legally in the United States and to eventually become U.S. citizens," the Washington Post said in a news story posted that day. The legislation, which did not draw widespread House support, also called for doubling the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border, the story said, and required the construction of 700 miles of fencing there. In addition, employers would newly be required to check the legal status of all job applicants using the government’s E-Verify system, the Post reported. Senators voted 68-32 for the plan with 14 Republicans joining Democrats on the "aye" side, the Post said. But Cornyn and fellow Texas Sen. Ted Cruz voted against final approval, the Dallas Morning News said in a news blog post the day of the vote, after voting earlier that day against bringing the proposal to a final vote. "The votes were no surprise," the News said. "Both openly opposed the bill." Stockman’s email blast condemning Cornyn singles out two other votes as indicative of Cornyn helping to advance Obama’s plan. Stockman wrote: "Cornyn voted with Democrats twice to kill our Republican filibuster of amnesty," adding that he was referring to two Senate votes that preceded days of floor debate. And what were those votes? On June 11, 2013, Cornyn was among 82 senators and more than 25 Republicans (though not Cruz), who voted for cloture, a hurdle that had to be cleared before the body could consider starting floor action on the legislation. That afternoon, Cornyn was among 84 senators to vote to proceed to debating the legislation. Brandewie guided us to a news blog post by the Houston Chronicle on that day, which said that although Republican leaders in the Senate "said they could not support the bill as written, they voted to move the legislation forward and allow lawmakers to change it through amendments." The blog post quoted Cornyn as saying that he voted to launch floor debate so he could offer a tighter border security amendment. "The bottom line is that if border and national security cannot be guaranteed in this bill, I cannot and will not support it," Cornyn said. Separately that day, Obama gave the measure his wholehearted endorsement, according to a New York Times news story posted online that afternoon, describing it as consistent with principles he had aired. "Nobody got everything they wanted," Obama said, according to the Post story. "Not Democrats. Not Republicans. Not me. But the Senate bill is consistent with the key principles for common-sense reform that I — and many others — have repeatedly laid out." We found no sign of Obama presenting an immigration proposal. That’s correct, Marc Rosenblum, an analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that studies worldwide immigration, told us by phone, though he also said the Senate plan largely aligned with a "blueprint" for reform issued by Obama in May 2011 that outlined his desired changes in law. The blueprint called for focused border security and holding employers accountable for hiring legal residents while also creating a way for farmers to hire foreigners to raise and harvest crops. In the document, Obama also said he favored giving law-abiding U.S. residents lacking legal residency, including children, ways to become eligible for citizenship. So, Cornyn voted against endorsing the immigration plan in committee, in favor of starting the Senate floor debate and against the legislation advancing to the House. Of course, there were other votes related to the legislation during floor action. Starting from Cornyn’s posted list of Senate floor votes, we peeked at the details of a dozen of his votes between the beginning of the floor action and final approval. Summing up, it looked to us like after agreeing to let debate proceed, Cornyn consistently voted on the side of Republicans opposed to the Senate plan. Ready to dig in? In a roll call vote on June 13, 2013, Cornyn was on the losing end of a 57-43 vote that set aside revisions offered by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that were described in a CNN news story that evening as intended to delay the legalization process for millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. until the Department of Homeland Security could certify it had effective control over the Southern border for six months. On June 18, 2013, Cornyn was on the losing end of several Republican efforts to change the legislation. In an initial floor vote, he and 38 fellow senators voted in favor of a failed move by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., to prevent the government from granting illegal immigrants legal status until at least 350 miles of double-tier fencing had been erected on the southern border, withholding full citizenship rights until 700 total miles had been built, according to a Washington Times news story posted online that day. Cornyn also voted for an unsuccessful attempt to stop any illegal immigrant from being granted legal status including citizenship until the government had put in place a biometric check-in and check-out system at every land, sea and airport entry point. Also that day, 94 senators unanimously voted to include tribal government officials on a border oversight task force. It seems reasonable to clump this vote with some others that were less contested as the immigration proposal edged forward: On June 19, 2013, Cornyn was among 72 senators who agreed to provide for limiting salaries for contractor executives and employees involved in border security and he also voted with most to include a Nevada resident on the Southern Border Security Commission. A day later, Cornyn was again on the losing end of Senate votes--including when he voted against setting aside a proposal by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., giving Congress, and not the Department of Homeland Security, ultimate authority to determine if the border is effectively secure, according to a National Review news blog post, which said Paul also sought enhanced security measures, such as requiring a double-layer fence to be completed within five years, plus other triggers to implemented before illegal immigrants could be awarded legal status, the magazine said. Similarly that day, Cornyn voted for a failed amendment described by authoring Sen Mike Lee, R-Utah, as giving the Senate a future say on whether the borders were secure before allowing immigrants to start the pathway to citizenship, according to a news story in The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication. Cornyn took a personal lump on June 20, 2013, as senators voted 54-43 to table his proposed revamp, which he pitched as reasonably beefing up border security, just before the Senate moved instead to a more ambitious border build-up approach. A news blog post by the Dallas Morning News in the wake of that action described Cornyn as steamed, going on to note that while Cornyn’s amendment called for 5,000 additional Border Patrol officers, the substitute proposal favored by Senate leaders called for 20,000 additional officers. "How much is it going to cost?" the News quoted Cornyn as saying of the successful amendment. From that moment through the Senate decision a week later to advance the immigration plan to the House, Cornyn was on the losing end of seven floor votes, including several related to considering and then accepting the alternative border security language. It looked to us like none of these votes could be interpreted as aligning Cornyn with the Senate’s Democratic majority or Obama. Summing up, Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute told us that he sees Stockman’s claim as a distortion. "On a fundamental level, it’s a misleading statement. It’s not Obama and it’s not amnesty," Rosenblum said, "but there were those two votes," he said, referring to Cornyn’s votes to let floor debate proceed. Our ruling Stockman said Cornyn voted twice in 2013 for Obama’s amnesty plan. That’s inaccurate to a ridiculous degree. For starters, Obama never offered an amnesty plan, though he endorsed the Senate-approved legislation, which envisioned ways that unauthorized immigrants could attain citizenship. This was also the plan that Cornyn consistently voted against; the two "aye" votes singled out by Stockman were procedural, relating to whether floor debate commenced and not to the legislation's merits. Given that Stockman’s claim misrepresented both the immigration measure and Cornyn’s votes, it merits flames. Pants on Fire! PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Steve Stockman | null | null | null | 2014-02-10T14:27:51 | 2014-01-31 | ['John_Cornyn', 'Barack_Obama'] |
goop-02938 | Selena Gomez Flaunting The Weeknd Romance To Hurt Bella Hadid? | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/selena-gomez-feud-bella-hadid-the-weeknd-romance/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Selena Gomez Flaunting The Weeknd Romance To Hurt Bella Hadid? | 2:12 pm, March 13, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-15198 | On unemployment rates: "We have counties in Southwest Virginia that are well into double digits and some that are pushing 20 percent." | false | /virginia/statements/2015/aug/17/israel-oquinn/israel-oquinn-says-some-sw-virginia-counties-are-n/ | One speaker after another railed against the Environmental Protection Agency during a recent meeting of the Virginia chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group founded by billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch. Among the critics was Del. Israel O’Quinn, R-Washington County, who traveled about 320 miles from his district in the southwest corner of Virginia to the Aug. 10 event at the University of Richmond. He warned that new EPA regulations curbing carbon emissions will pound the already wounded coal-producing counties in his district. "Virginia’s unemployment rate is not spectacular right now, regardless of what the governor would have you believe," O’Quinn said. "Now in Southwest Virginia, we have counties that are much, much higher. "We have counties in Southwest Virginia that are well into double digits and some that are pushing 20 percent unemployment. Twenty percent, that’s not an insignificant number and you can track almost every single one of those to the coal industry because when coal takes a downswing, the entire economy of Southwest Virginia takes a big lick right along with it." No doubt, the coal industry has seen better days and plays a vital role in Southwest Virginia’s economy. But we wondered whether counties in the region really are experiencing unemployment rates "well into the double digits" with some "pushing 20 percent." We defined Southwest Virginia based on a map published by the Center for Economic Education at Radford University. The region stretches from Lee County in the corner of the state to Roanoke County. It includes 19 counties and six cities. According to the Virginia Employment Commission’s latest statistics, the state had a seasonally unadjusted unemployment rate of 5 percent in June. The rate was 6.1 percent in Southwest Virginia. None of the counties or cities in the region had unemployment rates that came anywhere close to "pushing 20 percent," as O’Quinn said. Two counties were in low double digits: Buchanan at 11.1 percent and Dickenson at 10.2 percent. In third place was Wise County, with 9.2 percent unemployment. It’s notable that Buchanan, Dickenson and Wise have the highest unemployment rates in the region because they are the three largest coal-producing counties in Virginia and, according to VEC data, are home to about 80 percent of the state’s coal miners. In 1990, the three counties had 9,773 coal mining jobs. That plummeted to an average of 2,812 jobs last year. Coal mining also has steadily declined in Kentucky and West Virginia during recent decades, and experts cite several key reasons: increased competition from cheap shale gas and and from less expensive, low-sulfur coal out west, particularly Wyoming’s Powder River Basin; increased automation in coal mining; increased regulations from the EPA. Getting back to O’Quinn, it’s clear that the unemployment rate is high in Virginia’s three largest coal counties, but not as bad as the delegate described. When we asked O’Quinn for the source of his numbers, he sent us a map from the VEC confirming the county unemployment rates we’ve detailed and he told us he misspoke. He said he meant to say that "underemployment" was pushing 20 percent in some coal counties. Underemployment occurs when a person holds a job that is below his training and doesn’t meet his financial needs. Neither the VEC nor the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics measures underemployment for Virginia counties. O’Quinn told us many local government officials in his district "anecdotally" believe "underemployment there "could absolutely be as high as 20 percent." O’Quinn also said that since the release of June unemployment figures, coal companies in his district have filed federal notices that they are planning to lay off more workers. U.S. law requires most companies with 100 or more employees to provide 60 days notification in advance of layoffs. Records show one such notification, called a WARN notice, has been filed by a coal company in Virginia this year. On July 8, Alpha Natural Resources said it will lay off 165 Virginia workers on Sept. 6. Our ruling O’Quinn said, "We have counties in Southwest Virginia that are well into double digits and some that are pushing 20 percent unemployment." He offered the statistics at a rally where speakers were trying to muster opposition to new EPA carbon restrictions by arguing, in part, the rules will accelerate the decline in coal mining jobs. There is no county in the region that comes close to a 20 percent unemployment rate and it’s debatable whether any are "well into double digits." The highest June unemployment rates were in Virginia’s three biggest coal counties: Buchanan, 11.1 percent; Dickenson, 10.2 percent; and Wise, 9.2 percent. Those are big numbers. But McQuinn, who acknowledges he misspoke, exaggerated them. We rate his statement False. | null | Israel O'Quinn | null | null | null | 2015-08-17T00:00:00 | 2015-08-10 | ['Southwest_Virginia'] |
abbc-00318 | The claim: Joe Hockey has warned that Australia is at a "tipping point" and living beyond its means. "We cannot continue to go on borrowing $100 million a day as a government just to pay our daily bills," he said. | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-13/hockey-100-million/6085378 | The claim: Joe Hockey has warned that Australia is at a "tipping point" and living beyond its means. "We cannot continue to go on borrowing $100 million a day as a government just to pay our daily bills," he said. | ['federal-government', 'budget', 'liberals', 'australia'] | null | null | ['federal-government', 'budget', 'liberals', 'australia'] | Fact check: Hockey over-eggs 'borrowing $100 million a day' claim | Thu 3 Mar 2016, 6:01am | null | ['None'] |
snes-04150 | Neil deGrasse Tyson addressed gender inequality on Twitter by tearing apart a joke about women in science. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/neil-degrasse-tyson-twitter/ | null | Science | null | Brooke Binkowski | null | Did Neil deGrasse Tyson Address Gender Inequality in Science on Twitter? | 29 August 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05579 | Donald Trump violated Palm Beach ordinances by putting up an outsized U.S. flag and pole, then donating the money he was fined to veterans' organizations. | mostly true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-maralago-flagpole/ | null | Politics | null | David Mikkelson | null | Donald Trump’s Outsized Flagpole | 25 September 2015 | null | ['United_States', 'Donald_Trump'] |
vogo-00182 | How We Landed on ‘Misleading’ | none | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/how-we-landed-on-misleading/ | null | null | null | null | null | How We Landed on ‘Misleading’ | October 11, 2012 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01275 | Blake Shelton Making “Secret Late Night Calls” To Miranda Lambert, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/blake-shelton-miranda-lambert-calls-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Blake Shelton NOT Making “Secret Late Night Calls” To Miranda Lambert, Despite Report | 11:46 am, March 31, 2018 | null | ['Miranda_Lambert', 'Blake_Shelton'] |
snes-04794 | ISIS claimed responsibility for the May 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/isis-fort-mcmurray-fire/ | null | Conspiracy Theories | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Islamic State Started Fort McMurray Fire | 9 May 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05419 | Says "Amanda Fritz publicly claimed to be endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon, both on her website and in the voter’s guide." | half-true | /oregon/statements/2012/may/01/mary-nolan/did-amanda-fritz-inaccurately-claim-endorsement-na/ | Earlier last week, state Rep. Mary Nolan, D-Portland, issued a press release brimming with accusations against Portland City Commissioner Amanda Fritz. Nolan, who is running to unseat Fritz, said the incumbent had inaccurately claimed an endorsement from NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon: "Fritz publicly claimed to be endorsed by NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon, both on her website and in the voter’s guide. However, NARAL has given its sole endorsement to Mary Nolan. Fritz vowed to change the listing on her website and issue a statement correcting the error, but has failed to do so," the press release stated. The city of Portland doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with federal and state abortion policies. Still, an endorsement from a reproductive rights group probably matters in a left-leaning city where the two leading candidates for a council seat are both Democrats and women. Also, it just looks bad when a candidate makes up an endorsement. We set to find out the truth. First we checked the state Voters’ Pamphlet. Fritz lists among her supporters "NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon Choice Action Team." On her campaign website, she lists a "green light" designation from both "Basic Rights Oregon PAC (co-designation) and NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon Choice Action Team." Naturally you’re asking, what’s a choice action team and what’s a green light designation? The NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon PAC Board makes endorsements only at the statewide and legislative level, said executive director Michele Stranger Hunter. The Choice Action Team is a group of active volunteers within NARAL that studies local races and simply identifies whether the candidate is pro-choice or not. The Choice Action Team can only "green-light" a candidate; the team cannot make endorsements. NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon made an exception for Nolan, Stranger Hunter said, because of her exceptional advocacy. Nolan is able to get campaign help from NARAL. We asked Fritz if she had claimed an "endorsement" from NARAL. The commissioner emailed to say that she "mistakenly put NARAL ProChoice Oregon Choice Action Team" under the list of union and other group endorsements on her campaign website. Contacted by NARAL, Fritz reorganized her web site to make sure voters knew there was no endorsement, she said. Fritz also offered to PolitiFact Oregon statements of endorsements by NARAL’s Choice Action Team filed with county elections officials. They are signed by Caitlin Campbell, a field organizer, and allow the use of her name and the Choice Action Team. Fritz did not mention the group in The Oregonian’s Voter Guide at NARAL’s request. We went back to Nolan and told her Fritz had specified the Choice Action Team online and in print. Nolan, in response, told PolitiFact Oregon that Fritz should not cite any part of NARAL given that there is an endorsed candidate in the race. We called Todd Foster, chairman of NARAL’s political action committee. He said that a green-light does not mean the group supports the candidate, despite Campbell’s signed statement. So Fritz cannot claim support or an endorsement. (And neither can a lot of other candidates, apparently, including mayoral candidate Eileen Brady, who listed the Choice Action Team under "endorsements" in the Voters’ Pamphlet and another mayoral candidate, Jefferson Smith, who listed the Choice Action Team under "supporters.") We have one final bit of evidence to share. Nolan’s campaign sent along a clip from the Portland City Club debate March 30, during which Fritz claimed an endorsement from NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon. NARAL contacted her after the event and Fritz apologized and agreed to refrain from stating so in the future. So where are we with a ruling? We know Fritz inaccurately stated an endorsement at the City Club debate. But we don’t think we should factor that into the ruling because Nolan did not specify that in her statement, and Fritz amended her connection to NARAL after the March 30 debate. We also know that most voters likely wouldn’t know the difference between NARAL and its Choice Action Team. They would think the action team is the same as NARAL, when it’s not. So Nolan and NARAL are within their rights to complain about the confusion. Fritz did claim an endorsement on her website. (Then she fixed it.) But as Nolan argued herself to PolitiFact Oregon, words matter. And here, Fritz did not claim an endorsement from NARAL Pro-Choice Oregon in print. She listed the Choice Action Team under supporters and online as a green-light giver. She even received written permission from a Choice Action Team person to use the group’s name in the Voters’ Pamphlet. NARAL says Fritz shouldn’t claim support but other candidates are freely doing the same thing without complaint from the group’s leaders. The statement is accurate about the website, but inaccurate about the voters’ guide. We find Nolan’s statement Half True. Return to OregonLIve to comment on this ruling. | null | Mary Nolan | null | null | null | 2012-05-01T20:31:39 | 2012-04-24 | ['Oregon'] |
goop-00318 | Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle In “Secret Feud,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kate-middleton-meghan-markle-secret-feud-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle NOT In “Secret Feud,” Despite Report | 3:00 am, September 6, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-01444 | The last time there was a sustained surge of confidence in government's competence was under Ronald Reagan. | false | /punditfact/statements/2014/oct/05/george-will/george-will-america-hasnt-had-sustained-confidence/ | As the midterm elections get closer, Republicans are questioning the competence and trustworthiness of President Barack Obama. This is a theme that came into sharp focus during the immigration debate when House Republicans said they wouldn’t move forward because they didn’t trust the president to enforce the law. The botched launch of the Obamacare website did the president no favors. Now, Republicans are pouring concerns over Ebola and the Secret Service into the same mold. The pundits lobbed their opposing views at each other on Fox News Sunday. Brit Hume said the level of people saying the government is incompetent is higher than ever. Juan Williams shot back that the public always thinks the government is incompetent. George Will entered the fray to note that the country has most to fear from "excessive faith in government." Will skewered Republicans for engaging in nation building overseas and Democrats for their efforts to cure social ills at home. Then Will made an interesting historical observation. "The last time there was a sustained surge of confidence in government's competence was under (President) Ronald Reagan," Will said. Will is correct that public trust in government rose and then held steady under Reagan. But he errs in ignoring Bill Clinton’s two terms in office, when the public’s trust in government also rose sharply. In the following chart, the Pew Research Center averaged the results of a number of surveys since 1958 that probed the public’s trust in government. (The political scientists we reached said the words "confidence" and "trust" are largely synonymous in this context.) Source: Pew Research Center, Public trust in government: 1958-2013 Trust in government fluctuated during both the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, but under Reagan, trust rose by 11 percentage points -- from 33 percent to 44 percent. In the Clinton years, trust rose over 20 percentage points -- from 21 percent to 44 percent, according to data from American National Election Studies. As for Will’s use of the word "surge," gains in trust were steeper during Clinton’s two terms, but he started from a much lower point than Reagan. What lies behind the numbers The consensus among the political scientists we contacted is that trust in government tracks closely with the economy. "The growth in trust we observe under Reagan and Clinton coincides with economic expansions," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. In his forthcoming book, Why Washington Won’t Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis, Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington analyzed how party affiliation changes the survey results for trust in government. "Republicans in the electorate only seem to trust the government when Republicans are in office," Hetherington said. "Democrats trust government about the same amount over time. Republicans fluctuate a lot." Hetherington sent us this chart that tracks party affiliation and trust in government by who was president. Theda Skocpol, a political scientist at Harvard University, is skeptical about how much these polls actually reveal about American attitudes. Skocpol said these general opinions mask considerable nuances. "Americans express opposition or doubt when asked about government overall," Skocpol said. "But they usually like all the specifics (of programs) by wide margins." Skocpol gave the example of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the current Ebola scare might have taken a toll on the agency’s ranking, last year it stood at the top of the public’s list. According to Gallup, 60 percent of the people said the CDC was doing an excellent or good job. Our ruling George Will said the last time there was a "sustained surge" in confidence in government was under Reagan. While trust did rise and generally hold level in the Reagan years, it also had a steady and larger increase under Clinton. However you slice the numbers, it is clear that the American public had a "sustained surge of confidence" during Clinton's presidency. And Clinton, obviously, was president more recently than Reagan. We rate Will’s claim False. | null | George Will | null | null | null | 2014-10-05T17:10:20 | 2014-10-05 | ['Ronald_Reagan'] |
snes-03312 | An e-mail published by WikiLeaks revealed that three prominent Republicans were on Hillary Clinton's payroll. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/podesta-emails-show-3-prominent-republicans-on-clinton-payroll/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Podesta Emails Show 3 PROMINENT Republicans on Clinton Payroll | 19 December 2016 | null | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'WikiLeaks', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton'] |
pomt-00289 | Every former North Carolina governor opposes "constitutional amendments Raleigh lawmakers put on the ballot this fall." | false | /north-carolina/statements/2018/sep/27/stop-deceptive-amendments/ad-misleads-about-nc-governors-opposing-constituti/ | A new political ad suggests that each of North Carolina’s living former governors opposes proposed constitutional amendments on the November ballot. There are six proposed amendments that would change the state Constitution. One would require voters to show photo ID to participate in future elections. Another would enshrine the "right to hunt and fish" in the Constitution. Others would cap the state income tax rate at 7 percent and grant victims of crime the right to know specific legal information. Then there are the pair of proposed amendments that would reduce the governor’s power by limiting his or her authority to fill judicial vacancies and shifting the responsibility for appointing elections board members from the governor to the legislature. In the commercial, a narrator opens by asking viewers to "take a closer look at constitutional amendments Raleigh lawmakers put on the ballot this fall." "Every former chief justice and every former governor — Democrats and Republicans — all recommend voting no," the narrator continues. "They say these amendments are purposefully vague, a blank check for politicians who could block corruption investigations and strip all of our courts of independence, permanently. The closer you look at these misleading amendments, the worse they get. Vote no." Each of the amendments was put on the ballot by the legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. The commercial was paid for by the Stop Deceptive Amendments political committee, which is treasured by Michael Weisel. Weisel is an elections attorney who the Associated Press recently described as a prominent figure on the political left. The group bought airtime with WRAL-TV in Raleigh and Charlotte’s WSOC-TV, the Charlotte Observer reported Tuesday. Given that most North Carolinians are likely more familiar with governors than former chief justices, let’s turn our attention there. Is it true that every living former governor — including Republicans Pat McCrory and Jim Martin — opposes each of the six amendments? Put simply: no. Republican support While all former governors made news recently for opposing the amendments that affect the governor’s office, McCrory reaffirmed his support of the voter ID, victims’ rights, tax cap and hunting and fishing amendments during his radio show Monday morning. "It’s a false and misleading ad," McCrory said on WBT Radio in Charlotte. He also said he sent a letter to various media stations asking them to stop airing the ad, and threatened legal action if they don’t. "I demand that you immediately take down these advertisements, since they falsely impute to me a position which I have vocally opposed in the media, and further because such falsehoods inflict ongoing damage both to my reputation and to the campaign to pass Marsy’s Law, on which I am a prominent supporter and endorser," the letter says. Marsy’s Law is another name for the victims’ rights amendment. Chris Sinclair, an advocate for the proposed amendment, emailed PolitiFact a photo of McCrory speaking at a Marsy’s event at Latta Park in Charlotte on Sept. 10. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Martin, for his part, told us in an email that he holds the same view of the amendments that McCrory does. "Personally, I am opposed to the two previously identified amendments that remove appointive authority from the governor and transfer it to the legislature (for all practical purposes, to its leadership)," Martin’s email says. "They appear to be the last two of the referendum amendments on all ballots. I am not opposed to the other amendments." A denial Weisel, when contacted by PolitiFact, referred us to Stop Deceptive Ads spokesman Justin Guillory. Guillory said Tuesday the ad doesn’t, in fact, suggest that all former governors oppose all of the constitutional amendments. "The ad clearly references two amendments that would give additional appointment powers to the state legislature. Those are the same two amendments that McCrory opposes," Guillory wrote in an email. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com "We appreciate Gov. McCrory’s bipartisan leadership in opposing these two amendments and that’s why we chose to feature the five former governors in our ads," he continued. "Part of what is confusing about these constitutional amendments is that the legislature didn’t allow titles or any other identifiers on the ballot. There are no titles for us to reference in an ad." Guillory has a point: The amendments on the ballot will lack numbers or titles. (Read them on the N.C. Secretary of State website.) What the ad says Let’s look again at what the narrator says. Guillory says the ad is talking only about the two amendments related to gubernatorial powers. He says the narrator alludes to those two when saying they would "block corruption investigations and strip all of our courts from independence." But the ad makes no clear distinction between the two amendments affecting the governor’s powers, and the four others. The narrator says, "Take a closer look at constitutional amendments Raleigh lawmakers put on the ballot this fall." There’s no reason viewers would think to look at only two of them, specifically. Immediately after that, the narrator says: "Every former chief justice and every former governor — Democrats and Republicans — all recommend voting no." Again, there’s no distinction. A change Wednesday evening, Guillory sent an email announcing that the group had changed the ad. In the new version, the narrator begins the ad specifying the amendments that affect the governor’s power. "Take a closer look at two constitutional amendments Raleigh lawmakers put on the ballot this fall," the narrator says. Guillory says Stop Deceptive Amendments stands by its original version, but that "defeating these two amendments is more important than a political spat. "We’ve sent a revised version of the ad to TV stations that clarifies which two amendments the five governors oppose," Guillory said. "We continue to appreciate Gov. McCrory’s bi-partisan leadership in opposing these two amendments and the courage it takes for him to confront the legislative leaders of his own party. We look forward to working with leaders of both parties to defeat these two dangerous and misleading amendments." Our ruling The original Stop Deceptive Amendments commercial suggests that every former North Carolina governor opposes all six constitutional amendments. That’s not true. McCrory and Martin (the only two former Republican governors who are still living) oppose the two amendments that affect the governor’s powers, but support the other four amendments. While PolitiFact appreciates the group’s effort to be more accurate, we must set the record straight for those who have already seen the original ad and rate this claim False. This story was produced by the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project, a partnership of McClatchy Carolinas, the Duke University Reporters’ Lab and PolitiFact. The NC Local News Lab Fund and the International Center for Journalists provide support for the project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com | null | Stop Deceptive Amendments | null | null | null | 2018-09-27T15:00:58 | 2018-09-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-05810 | After Arizona banned smoking in "all public places" in 2007, "admissions for acute myocardial infarction … stroke, asthma, [and] angina decreased following the implementation of the ban." | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2012/feb/22/richard-morrison/rhode-island-state-rep-richard-p-morrison-says-ari/ | Rhode Island would extend the current ban on smoking in workplaces, restaurants and bars to a slew of public places, including beaches, parks and playgrounds, under legislation introduced by state Rep. Richard P. Morrison. The health benefits of a wider ban -- which would be one of the strictest in the country -- far outweigh any inconvenience to smokers, the Bristol Democrat said at a State House hearing on Feb. 15. To bolster his point, Morrison pointed to another state that passed a far-reaching ban on smoking five years ago. "If we pass this, we are not alone," he said at the hearing before the House Health, Education and Welfare Committee. "The State of Arizona in 2007 banned smoking in all public places, and an unintended consequence of that, in the first year alone, the admissions for acute myocardial infarction -- or heart attack, for a better term -- stroke, asthma, angina, decreased following the implementation of the ban." "The reductions in hospital charges are estimated to total $16 million in the first 13 months after the ban was put into place," he continued. "It’s an unintended consequence, but it’s a really good unintended consequence." Morrison’s statement caught our attention. Could Arizona really have seen nearly immediate benefits from its smoking ban? Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia currently have some type of statewide indoor smoking ban in place. Some bans are confined only to workplaces. Many include restaurants and bars. Hundreds of municipalities have also enacted bans, including New York City, which attracted widespread attention after prohibiting smoking in public parks and other outdoor places last year. Arizona’s statewide ban on smoking does not go as far as New York City’s ban or Morrison’s proposal for Rhode Island. The Smoke-Free Arizona Act prohibits smoking in workplaces, as well as restaurants, bars and other enclosed public places, but does not apply to parks or other outdoor spaces. The ban took effect May 1, 2007, after winning passage in a referendum the previous November. When we asked Morrison about the health effects of that ban, he sent us two references to a study in Arizona that was published in the American Journal of Public Health. Both references -- one from a science website and the other from a Rhode Island study on the Ocean State’s 2005 smoking ban -- only summarized the results, so we contacted the Journal, which sent us the full article. In the peer-reviewed study that was published in March 2011, Patricia M. Herman and Michele E. Walsh, researchers at the University of Arizona’s department of psychology, examined hospital admissions before and after Arizona banned indoor smoking. They compared data from the state’s 87 hospitals from January 2004 to April 2007 -- up until the ban went into effect -- to the 13-month period afterward, from May 1, 2007, to May 31, 2008. Herman and Walsh looked at admissions for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), angina, stroke and asthma -- all diagnoses connected to smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke. They only considered patients that were Arizona residents. Herman and Walsh found that admissions for all four diagnoses dropped, in some cases significantly, in the period after the ban took effect. Cases of acute myocardial infarction decreased by 13 percent, angina by 33 percent, stroke by 14 percent and asthma by 22 percent. The estimated savings in hospital costs from those reductions were $16.8 million. The study attempted to account for reductions in these rates that could have been caused by other factors by separating the hospitals into two groups -- those in areas where county-level or municipal smoking bans were already in effect and those in places that had never had bans. If the decreases were larger in places that hadn’t had bans, then they were attributed to the statewide ban. The authors concluded that the results of their study, combined with other research on smoking bans that had similar findings, showed "there is now little room to doubt their effectiveness." Herman and Walsh noted that there have been many studies that found a causal relationship between smoking bans and reductions in hospital visits for respiratory and heart conditions. But independent reviews concluded that some of those studies were not optimal. And critics have said that the results of those and other studies were overblown, countering that heart attack rates have been dropping anyway because of improved treatment. Although there is still some debate about the effectiveness of smoking bans, we couldn’t find any challenges to the results of the Arizona study. Our ruling To prove the effectiveness of broad smoking bans in improving public health, Representative Morrison pointed to Arizona’s experience. His statement about the nearly immediate benefits of that state’s ban was based on a reputable scientific study, which he characterized accurately. But he mischaracterized Arizona’s ban as applying to all public spaces, when it actually applies only to all public indoor spaces -- a big difference. Because of that inaccuracy, we rate Morrison’s claim Half True. (Get updates from PolitiFactRI on Twitter. To comment or offer your ruling, visit us on our PolitiFact Rhode Island Facebook page.) | null | Richard Morrison | null | null | null | 2012-02-22T06:00:00 | 2012-02-15 | ['Arizona'] |
pomt-10907 | Says HHS Secretary Alex Azar called family separations at the border and detention of children in cages "one of the great acts of American generosity and charity" and "is now in charge." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/aug/02/equity-forward/ad-targets-hhs-secretary-alex-azar-generosity-and-/ | An ad targeting Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar portrays him as callously describing the situation with immigrant children at the border as "one of the great acts of American generosity and charity." Why go after Azar? As HHS secretary, he oversees the department that cares for children who were separated from their families by other agencies under the administration’s "zero tolerance" prosecution policy for all immigrants who illegally enter the United States. The ad from Equity Forward, which describes itself as a watchdog of anti-reproductive health groups and individuals, opens with the sound of wailing children, a photo of a chain-link fence, and video of women in lines with children (The Washington Post Fact Checker found that the families in the video were at a way station for families paroled from detention centers). It moves on to a photo of children standing near a white tent behind tall fences, followed by a photo and video of Azar. It ends with pictures of bunk beds, of tents and of Azar with President Donald Trump. Here’s the text: Narrator: "They are terrified. Taken from their mothers and fathers and detained in cages. In Washington, Secretary Alex Azar is now in charge." Azar: "It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids." Narrator: "Generosity? No, Secretary Azar. This is a disgrace. Call Congress, tell them to reunite these children with their parents and hold Azar accountable." See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com We looked into it. Azar did offer a rosy assessment in an interview about children separated from their parents. But the ad neglects a striking amount of context, including what precipitated Azar’s remark and singling him out as "in charge" of the situation without offering specifics. ‘Generosity and charity’ The framing of the ad suggests Azar said the separation and detention of children was a generous and charitable thing." It says he is "in charge" right after showing video of children and saying they were "taken from their mothers and fathers and detained in cages." Azar’s remark came July 10 as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer questioned him about media access to facilities keeping children, which are overseen by Azar’s agency. Azar said children deserve privacy and respect and "we’ll be as transparent as possible, consistent with that." Blitzer: "They deserve that privacy. I’m just saying, we would guarantee that they would blur their faces. No one would see the kids’ faces. We just want to go in and do our job. If there is nothing to hide, I don’t see what the problem would be." Azar: "Wolf, we are happy to work, we want to be transparent. We have nothing to hide about how we operate these facilities, our grantees. It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally. So, we don’t have anything to hide about it. We just have to protect privacy." See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Azar lauded workers caring for the children and said the kids were "happy," "loved" and in a "compassionate environment." Azar wasn’t lauding the charity of family separations. "What they have done is conflate the secretary's statement with the policy," HHS spokesman Mark Weber said. "The secretary's statement was in the context of the care HHS provides to the children once they get to us." Equity Forward executive director Mary Alice Carter said the point of the ad was to show administrative failures with Azar as secretary. The group also said there were reports of children going hungry at some facilities and of children "subject to other harsh rules and conditions." "During his CNN interview, Azar claimed that all of these locations have kids that are ‘happy’ and ‘getting snacks,'" Carter said. "With this ad, Equity Forward is highlighting the fact that some of these facilities are tents on military bases behind massive fence enclosures. Azar and the administration never had a plan to reunite the children with their families." The ad's narrator also said children were "detained in cages," but the ad did not illustrate that. (See our coverage offering context on claims about caged children.) Claims about cages holding children have generally being in reference to detention centers operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of Homeland Security — not HHS, which Azar oversees. Instead of cages, the ad used photos of tents. Tents in Texas are being used as temporary shelters for teen minors who were separated at the border and who arrived alone, Weber said. For a small proportion of children in HHS care, Weber said, tents in Tornillo, Texas, are the last stop before reunification or release to a suitable sponsor. "To suggest (separated children) were all sent to a tent city is false," Weber said. Overall, HHS currently has more than 11,000 children in its custody across 100 facilities in 17 states. The number of children in its custody fluctuates as they are transferred in and out of HHS care, but the overwhelming majority came alone without their parents. Our ruling An Equity Forward ad says Azar called family separations at the border and detention of children in cages "one of the great acts of American generosity and charity" and "is now in charge." Azar made that comment in reference to the care provided at facilities. He wasn’t saying that specifically about the "zero-tolerance" immigration policy or family separations. Equity Forward told PolitiFact the point of its ad was to highlight shortcomings in the policy’s implementation and issues at some facilities, and the fact that some facilities are tents. Yet the ad said children were in cages and insinuated that Azar was in charge of the separations and the treatment of children. Azar does lead the department that has custody over the children, but the separations are a result of prosecution referrals from Homeland Security to the Justice Department. The ad contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com | null | Equity Forward | null | null | null | 2018-08-02T09:00:00 | 2018-07-23 | ['United_States'] |
snes-04107 | A video shows a chimpanzee rapidly memorizing the location of numbers from 1-9 on a touch screen, demonstrating its ability to recall their location by tapping (in sequential order) boxes that covered those numbers after a fraction of a second. | mostly true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chimpanzee-rapidly-memorizes-locates-numbers-on-a-screen/ | null | Science | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Chimpanzee Rapidly Memorizes, Locates Numbers on a Screen | 4 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00357 | Jessica Simpson Making “Singing Comeback” On Sister Ashlee Simpson’s Reality Show, | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jessica-simpson-singing-comeback-sister-ashlee-reality-show-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jessica Simpson NOT Making “Singing Comeback” On Sister Ashlee Simpson’s Reality Show, Despite Reports | 11:17 am, August 30, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12390 | California Gov. Jerry Brown was "Caught in the Middle of a $60 Billion Corruption Investigation." | pants on fire! | /california/statements/2017/may/30/blog-posting/pants-fire-distorted-claim-about-jerry-browns-role/ | A conservative news website with a penchant for phony claims recently alleged California Gov. Jerry Brown was "caught in the middle" of a huge corruption probe. The April 17, 2017 headline on consjournal.com read "CA Gov. Jerry Brown Caught in the Middle of a $60 Billion Corruption Investigation." Just below the headline is a giant, blaring graphic reading "BREAKING NEWS." If correct, this would be a seismic story across California and the nation. We set out to see if there’s even a hint of truth in this claim. Our research The article cites news reports in the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times that detail a very real investigation Brown ordered into the Board of Equalization. The governor asked state prosecutors in April to examine claims that employees of the state tax agency misused state resources. The agency is headed by a five-person independent board elected by the public. The governor’s call for action followed an audit by his administration that uncovered mismanagement in the tax agency, which is responsible for collecting $60 billion in taxes annually. Nothing, however, in the consjournal.com article or the Bee or the Times suggest that Brown is a subject of that investigation as the headline strongly implies. We asked consjournal.com for evidence Brown was ‘caught in the middle’ of the probe. A representative emailed a link to an article by Breitbart.com, another conservative website, that summarizes the governor’s call for an investigation, but says nothing about Brown being a subject of it. The headline also caught the attention of the fact-checking website Snopes.com, which gave the claim its most severe rating, False. It added "the story didn’t stand up to the barest of scrutiny." Other wild claims The website’s claim about the governor is comparable to other ridiculous claims on consjournal.com. In October 2015, the website published an article with a reckless headline saying "BREAKING: Illegal Aliens In California Able To VOTE, New Bill Just Signed." It referred to Brown’s signing of the state’s New Motor Voter Law that registers eligible citizens to vote when they obtain or renew their driver’s license. There is a separate process that allows people in the country illegally to obtain a California driver’s license. Those individuals are not given the option to register to vote. "We’ve built the protocols and the firewalls to not register people that aren’t eligible," Alex Padilla, the state’s top elections official told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. "We’re going to keep those firewalls in place." In March 2016, the website also published a misleading headline saying "California Gov. Jerry Brown Says If Trump Is Elected He Will Build A Wall Around The State." Several lines into the article, it notes Brown added: "By the way that is a joke. We don’t like walls, we like bridges." Our rating The conservative website consjournal.com recently claimed in a headline that California Gov. Jerry Brown was "Caught in the Middle of a $60 Billion Corruption Investigation." In reality, Brown ordered the investigation in question. There’s no evidence in the corresponding story or in any articles by outlets that have covered the investigation in-depth to show the governor is in any way a subject of the probe. This isn’t the website’s first headline to mangle the truth about Brown and his administration. We rate its claim Pants On Fire. PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2017-05-30T17:13:03 | 2017-04-17 | ['California', 'Jerry_Brown'] |
snes-03486 | Bill Cosby was appointed the Secretary for Women's Rights by president-elect Donald Trump. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-appoints-bill-cosby-as-secretary-for-womens-rights/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Did Trump Appoint Bill Cosby as Secretary for Women’s Rights? | 25 November 2016 | null | ['Donald_Trump', 'Bill_Cosby'] |
wast-00184 | What did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together [in the military]? | 3 pinnochios | ERROR: type should be string, got " https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/09/08/no-trump-and-lauer-military-sexual-assaults-are-not-about-men-and-women-having-sex/" | null | null | Donald Trump | Michelle Ye Hee Lee | null | No, Trump and Lauer: Military sexual assaults are not about men and women having sex | September 8, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
tron-01677 | FBI Reports No Deaths at Sandy Hook | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/sandy-hook-fbi-death-count/ | null | government | null | null | null | FBI Reports No Deaths at Sandy Hook | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02268 | Executive branch agents raided and shut down the EPA. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-just-raided-epa/ | null | Junk News | null | David Mikkelson | null | Trump Just Raided His Own EPA? | 5 June 2017 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00961 | Tyler Perry Warns Fans About Scam Facebook Pages Using His Name | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/tyler-perry-warns-fans-about-scam-facebook-pages-using-his-name/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Tyler Perry Warns Fans About Scam Facebook Pages Using His Name | July 12, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-06172 | A letter to the editor suggested that 2007's early start to Daylight Saving Time contributed to global warming. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/warming-trend/ | null | Humor | null | David Mikkelson | null | Daylight Saving Time Exacerbates Global Warming? | 24 April 2007 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12768 | Target to discontinue sale of Holy Bible. | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/feb/23/blog-posting/target-did-not-stop-selling-bible-stores-despite-f/ | A fake news story that claimed discount store chain Target would no longer sell the Bible doesn’t stand up to a more careful reading. The website NewsLeak.co, which is registered to an address in the Eurasian capital of Tbilisi, Georgia, ran an undated story around Feb. 16, 2017, with the headline, "Target to discontinue sale of Holy Bible." The story was flagged by Facebook as part of its efforts to rid its news feeds of fake news. The story said the store had been under fire for its policy of allowing transgendered customers to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identified. That part is accurate. But the story veers into false territory by saying Target CEO Bryan Hornell claimed the chain "will no longer cater to religious extremists" by selling the Bible. Hornell allegedly said in a letter that Targets would start phasing out anything related to religion — including Christmas decorations — in its stores. There are many examples of this story all over the Internet, but none of them are true. They’re all based on a (currently deleted) May 16, 2016, story from NationalReport.net, a site that generates made-up articles. "All news articles contained within National Report are fiction, and presumably fake news," its disclaimer reads. That disclaimer isn’t on the stories themselves, and don’t look to appear on earnest reposts of the article on other sites. Beyond that, there are clues that this isn’t a real story, starting with the fact that the chairman and CEO of Target is Brian Cornell, not Bryan Hornell. As for being able to buy the good book, a search of the Target.com website turns up 791 results in a search for "Holy Bible," so it’s readily available. But just to make sure, we contacted Target’s public relations department, which assured us that yes, you can still buy the Bible in stores. And no, there were no plans to change that. Target did eventually start offering private bathrooms to try to settle the boycott over transgendered bathrooms, but it never said it would stop selling the Bible. We rate this statement Pants On Fire! https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/eb166a41-f45d-47df-87c1-3df849991812 | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2017-02-23T13:00:00 | 2017-02-16 | ['None'] |
faan-00049 | “Stephen Harper is the only prime minister in Canadian history who, when asked about the recession during his mandate, gets to say, ‘Which one?’” | factscan score: false | http://factscan.ca/tom-mulcair-which-recession/ | Harper is not the first prime minister to govern over a period with two recessions. Several others did too. Since 1926, there were more prime ministers who held power for over five years who saw at least two recessions than those who did not. | null | Tom Mulcair | null | null | null | 2015-10-18 | ugust 6, 2015 | ['Canada', 'Stephen_Harper'] |
pomt-02226 | Democrats very much are in the pocket of the NRA. | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2014/apr/17/nia-malika-henderson/msnbc-guest-says-democrats-are-pocket-nra/ | When billionaire Michael Bloomberg stepped down as mayor of New York City, the big question was what would he do next? This week, Bloomberg gave part of the answer. He unveiled a $50 million fund to advance the cause of gun control, an issue that has long been close to his heart. Even in a political ecosystem flooded with cash, this was more than enough to get peoples’ attention. On MSNBC, Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson figured that the money might have some impact if Bloomberg spent strategically in certain states and cities. As for change at the federal level, Henderson that gave long odds. "I think the NRA (National Rifle Association) is a formidable force," Henderson said. "It’s a formidable force because Democrats very much are in the pocket of the NRA and they didn’t want to vote against the NRA." We are checking whether Democrats are "in the pocket of the NRA." We emailed and tweeted Henderson to learn what information led her to that conclusion. We did not hear back. In Henderson’s absence, we find two ways to assess her statement - quantitatively through the lens of campaign dollars, and qualitatively through the lens of Democrats’ actions. Jeffrey Berry is a political scientist at Tufts University who has studied the role of special interest groups in Washington. Berry called Henderson’s words "a gross mischaracterization." "Most leaders of the Democratic Party do not support the goals of the NRA and are not ‘in the pocket’ of the organization," Berry said. "Many Democratic leaders are avowed supporters of gun control, including the president of the United States. There's a reason why the NRA is so hostile toward the Democratic Party." Campaign contribution numbers show the NRA’s clear preference for Republicans over Democrats. According the Center for Responsive Politics, nearly 90 percent of the NRA’s donations went to Republican candidates or parties in the 2012 elections. The NRA gave more than $1.1 million. Even Henderson’s own paper, the Washington Post, reported on some of these numbers. Here’s what that looks like: In the current election cycle, the trend is even more lopsided. So far, the NRA has given about 96 percent of its contributions to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. But if we look at how the gun control issue has played out in Congress, especially in the Senate, we see some Democrats exercising great caution where the NRA is concerned. In last year’s vote on requiring background checks for all commercial gun sales, the proposal failed in part because four key Democrats opposed it. The list included Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. All represented rural states where gun rights are popular. Baucus decided not to run for re-election and both Begich and Pryor face tough races. The Democratic control of the Senate likely hinges on how Democrats fare in close elections, and their appetite for taking on the NRA is limited. Rutgers University political scientist Beth Leech said the relationship between Democrats and the NRA is not one of partnership, but dread. If some Democrats are afraid to take on the NRA, it’s not because of campaign cash supporting them. It’s because of the NRA money that might be used to try and defeat them. "The NRA spent $11 million in 2012 on outside expenditures," Leech said. "Many Democrats may be afraid of seeing that outside spending power used against them in an election." Our ruling Henderson said Democrats are in the pocket of the NRA. Henderson did not send us any information to support or clarify her statement. In terms of campaign contributions, the NRA sends its money almost entirely to Republicans. In the sense that "in the pocket" means a cozy comfortable relationship, the political scientists we reached said Henderson’s claim was wrong. On the other hand, the record shows that on key votes, some Democrats will avoid raising the ire of the NRA. The relationship is hardly cozy but the result is the same. Henderson’s words don’t capture this factor well, but due to it, enough Democrats end up doing what the NRA wants. We rate the claim Mostly False. | null | Nia-Malika Henderson | null | null | null | 2014-04-17T17:43:20 | 2014-04-16 | ['Democratic_Party_(United_States)'] |
tron-02888 | Rep. Adam Schiff’s Sister is Married to George Soros’ Son | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/rep-adam-schiffs-sister-married-george-soros-son-fiction/ | null | politics | null | null | ['congress', 'donald trump', 'fbi', 'russia'] | Rep. Adam Schiff’s Sister is Married to George Soros’ Son | Feb 6, 2018 | null | ['George_Soros'] |
tron-00853 | Letter from Mark, the Director of Facebook: Facebook to Begin Charging | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/letter-mark-director-facebook-facebook-begin-charging-fiction/ | null | computers | null | null | ['cyberattacks', 'facebook', 'scam'] | Letter from Mark, the Director of Facebook: Facebook to Begin Charging | Dec 20, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09628 | We had no domestic attacks under Bush. | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/08/rudy-giuliani/giuliani-says-there-were-no-domestic-attacks-durin/ | Republican Rudy Giuliani is painting President Barack Obama as weak on terrorism and is longing for the days of former President George W. Bush. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and a candidate for president in 2008, appeared on Good Morning America on Jan. 8, 2010, to offer his assessment of the Obama administration's counterterrorist operations. He criticized plans to try suspected Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in a Michigan criminal court and questioned Obama's decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Giuliani said U.S. intelligence agencies stand to lose potentially critical information on other al-Qaida operatives and operations if the man at the center of the Northwest flight terror incident is tried in U.S. court. "What he (Obama) should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama," Giuliani said. "Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn't do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected was both Bush's responsibility and Obama's." Giuliani, the mayor of New York City during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, claims there were no domestic attacks under the Bush administration. That's obviously a preposterous statement that would warrant a Pants on Fire rating. We can't help but remember now-Vice President Joe Biden's line during his presidential campaign, "Rudy Giuliani -- there's only three things he mentions in a sentence. A noun and a verb and 9/11." Unfortunately, interviewer George Stephanopoulos never sought clarification on Giuliani's statement. After the interview, Stephanopoulos updated his blog to say Giuliani was wrong to say there were no domestic attacks under Bush, and then later apologized for not pressing him on the misstatement. But let's treat this as if Giuliani meant to say there were no domestic attacks under Bush post-Sept. 11, 2001, and run that past the Truth-O-Meter. The FBI offers a broad definition of terrorism, calling it "the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives." Even stricter definitions would have to include: The anthrax scare. Shortly after 9/11, letters laced with anthrax began appearing in the U.S. mail. Letters went to U.S. senators and news organizations. Before it was over, five Americans were killed and another 17 were injured. "The nation was terrorized in what became the worst biological attacks in U.S. history," according to the FBI. The shoe bomber. In December 2001, admitted al-Qaida member Richard Reid boarded a plane in Miami with plastic explosives packed in special hollowed-out shoes. The bomb failed to ignite properly and no passengers were hurt. The incident, however, led to Americans having to remove their shoes during airport security screening. The D.C. sniper case. John Allen Muhammad was convicted on capital terrorism charges for his part in the shooting of 16 people in and around the D.C. area in September and October 2002. Muhammad was executed last year. His 17-year-old accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, was sentenced to life in prison. All three events occurred after Sept. 11 and have been considered terror plots by the federal and state governments. Media Matters For America, a liberal group that analyzes the news media, documented other examples of U.S. terrorism: 2002 attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet opened fire at an El Al Airlines ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two people and wounding four others before being shot dead. Media Matters found a 2004 Justice Department report that Hadayet's case had been "officially designated as an act of international terrorism." Campus attack at UNC. In March 2006, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate drove an SUV onto campus, striking nine pedestrians. Reza Taheri-azar reportedly stated in a letter: "I was aiming to follow in the footsteps of one of my role models, Mohammad Atta, one of the 9/11/01 hijackers, who obtained a doctorate degree." A spokesman for Giuliani attempted to clarify the former mayor's remark several hours after the GMA interview, saying the statement "didn't come across as it was intended" and that Giuliani was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil," according to ABC News. It wasn't clear to us, or most of the world. But okay. Taking the literal definition of "on our soil," that would exclude the failed December 2001 shoe bombing incident since it happened in the air. But not the others. If you add the second layer of "Islamic terrorist attacks," the sniper and anthrax attacks could come off the list as well, because it is unclear if extremist Muslim ideology motivated either attack. Hadayet, the shooter in the Los Angeles ticket counter shooting, was killed during the attack by security personnel. So we don't know his motivation. Taheri-azar's own words make his motivation pretty clear. But now we're getting to a lot of ifs. And more importantly, that's not what Giuliani said on national television. Here's how Giuliani tried to clarify the issue during an interview later that day with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "This is so silly," Giuliani said. "What I usually say when I say that, I usually say we had no major domestic attacks under President Bush since Sept. 11. I did omit the words 'since Sept. 11.' I apologize for that." Giuliani went on to say it's not clear if the anthrax attacks were perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists. We're not sure if Giuliani's claim that Obama has had only one domestic attack in his first year as president is right, either. Besides the Christmas Day bombing attempt, several U.S. lawmakers have already labeled the November Fort Hood shooting as an act of terrorism. The Giuliani spokesman, whom ABC News did not identify, said the "one" attack that Giuliani says took place during the Obama administration was a reference to the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. (Again, excluding the Christmas Day bombing plot by using the "on our soil" addendum.) Giuliani ran a presidential campaign based on the leadership he showed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We would expect him to at least acknowledge that those attacks occurred while George W. Bush was president. But even considering that he was talking post-9/11, Giuliani is just plain wrong to suggest no terrorist attacks happened under Bush's watch. The clarifications added by a Giuliani spokesman are threaded so thin, it sounds like damage control more than anything. We say Pants on Fire! | null | Rudy Giuliani | null | null | null | 2010-01-08T16:19:53 | 2010-01-08 | ['None'] |
pomt-12902 | We've made other countries rich while the wealth ... of our country has dissipated over the horizon. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/jan/20/donald-trump/trump-wrongly-says-us-has-made-others-rich-while-o/ | In his inaugural address, President Donald Trump painted a picture of a nation that has steadily marched down the wrong path. "We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon," he said. "One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world." Trump vowed to end this "American carnage." It’s tough to measure strength and confidence, but there are ways to measure wealth. We decided to look at whether America’s wealth has fallen while other countries became rich. Trump’s office told us he was thinking about America’s $800 billion trade deficit. However, trade deficits are not a measure of national or household wealth. There is no question that trade with China has cost America jobs to the benefit of Chinese workers. But again, Trump said we made other countries rich while our wealth faded and that’s a different point. Economists measure the wealth of nations in two ways. They look at the size of their economies, the GDP, and they look at how well the average citizen is doing, or GDP per capita. Through either lens, the wealth of the United States has not dissipated. This chart comes from International Monetary Fund data. With its $18 trillion economy, the United States is a good one-third wealthier than its closest economic rival, China. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com China’s economy avoided the dip that the United States faced in the Great Recession, and it has grown at a faster rate, but America remains the wealthiest nation. Seen through the lens of GDP per capita (and factoring in the purchasing power of each currency), the United States looks even better compared to China, a country Trump often points to as the source of America’s woes. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com China ranks 83rd in the world on a per capita basis because while its economy is huge, it has about 1.3 billion people, many of whom are very poor. There is one way to look at the shifting economic fortunes of the typical adult that does express a sense of what Trump described. The international bank Credit Suisse has calculated adult wealth since 2000. Using their 2016 data, we find that the median wealth rose in each of the largest economies, including the United States, but it rose nearly three times faster in China than it did in the United States. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Our ruling Trump said that other countries became rich while the wealth of America "dissipated." Based on the most common measures of national wealth, that is inaccurate. The United States has the world’s largest economy and, when averaged across the population, the typical American does better than the people of any other country. There is some argument to be made that the typcial Chinese worker's wealth has gone up much faster than the typical American's, but the American is still much wealthier. We rate this claim Mostly False. Share the Facts Politifact 3 6 Politifact Rating: "We've made other countries rich while the wealth ... of our country has dissipated over the horizon." Donald Trump President of the United States Presidential inauguration Friday, January 20, 2017 -01/-20/2017 Read More info | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2017-01-20T16:38:55 | 2017-01-20 | ['None'] |
abbc-00103 | The claim: Labor said the Coalition was spending 10 times as much on negative ads, the Coalition said Labor would massively outspend it and Clive Palmer said the Liberals spent $54 million on their campaign. | in-the-red | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-20/ad-spending-claims-pure-campaign-spin/4966426 | The claim: Labor said the Coalition was spending 10 times as much on negative ads, the Coalition said Labor would massively outspend it and Clive Palmer said the Liberals spent $54 million on their campaign. | ['advertising-and-marketing', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'rudd-kevin', 'clive-palmer', 'minor-parties', 'liberals', 'alp', 'australia'] | null | null | ['advertising-and-marketing', 'federal-government', 'abbott-tony', 'rudd-kevin', 'clive-palmer', 'minor-parties', 'liberals', 'alp', 'australia'] | Rudd, Abbott, Palmer's ad spending claims pure campaign spin | Thu 3 Oct 2013, 1:11am | null | ['Coalition_(Australia)', 'Australian_Labor_Party'] |
pomt-02925 | Even after Obamacare is fully implemented, there still will be tens of millions of people not covered. | true | /punditfact/statements/2013/nov/01/suzanne-somers/suzanne-somers-says-even-obamacare-tens-millions-w/ | The actress Suzanne Somers, best known for her role on the 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, sparked controversy recently when she wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal that harshly criticized President Barack Obama’s health care law. In her column, topped by the provocative title, "The Affordable Care Act Is a Socialist Ponzi Scheme," Somers argued that "the word ‘affordable’ is a misnomer. So far, all you are hearing on the news is how everyone’s premiums are doubling and tripling and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the whole thing is a big mess. Plus, even after Obamacare is fully implemented, there still will be tens of millions of people not covered. So what’s the point? Medical care will be degraded, the costs will skyrocket, and most frightening of all, your most intimate and personal information is now up for grabs." The column prompted a backlash, as critics took issue with the substance of her arguments while also snickering at the Journal’s need to append multiple corrections to the column. (The correction called a quotation Somers had attributed to V.I. Lenin "widely disputed," a quotation attributed to Winston Churchill unconfirmed, said Somers had misstated the type of animal used on a cover of Maclean’s magazine in 2008 -- it was a dog, not a horse.) "In fewer than 600 words, Somers managed to purvey untruths, misinterpretations, made-up quotes and irrelevant anecdotes," said one particularly stinging response by the Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian. But it turns out that not everything Somers said is wrong. Here we’ll take a look at her claim that "even after Obamacare is fully implemented, there still will be tens of millions of people not covered." We can’t predict the future, but we can turn to the best available independent analysis of the health care law’s impact -- projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO’s most recent projections, from February 2013, produced the following figures: Year Number of non-elderly people without insurance Percentage of the population without insurance 2013 55 million 20% 2014 44 million 16% 2015 37 million 14% 2016 31 million 11% 2017 29 million 10% 2018 29 million 10% 2019 29 million 10% 2020 29 million 10% 2021 29 million 10% 2022 29 million 10% 2023 30 million 10% So, Somers is right -- by 2023, there will still be 30 million Americans without insurance. Presumably these will be a combination of people who opt to pay a penalty rather than signing up for insurance, people or families who are exempted because they can’t find affordable coverage, and undocumented immigrants, who are exempt from the mandate to purchase insurance. Obamacare supporters will surely counter that the number of uninsured Americans will drop over this decade-long period by 25 million people, or almost half, despite overall population growth. In addition, the percentage of uninsured Americans will be cut in half, from 20 percent today to 10 percent a decade from now, according to CBO. Our ruling Somers wrote that, "even after Obamacare is fully implemented, there still will be tens of millions of people not covered." She’s right -- by 2023, CBO projects that 30 million Americans will lack health insurance. While this is lower than today’s figure both in absolute numbers and in the percentage of the population, that doesn’t take away from the basic accuracy of Somers’ claim. We rate her claim True. | null | Suzanne Somers | null | null | null | 2013-11-01T17:30:30 | 2013-11-28 | ['None'] |
snes-04083 | A fake news article reported that a cross-eyed woman cut off her partner's penis after he refused to look her in the eye during sex. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shania-jones-cross-eyed-arrest/ | null | Junk News | null | Dan Evon | null | Crazed Woman Cuts Off Man’s Penis for Not Making Eye Contact During Sex | 7 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00586 | Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt Married In Secret? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-married-secret-wedding-ring/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt Married In Secret? | 8:32 pm, July 24, 2018 | null | ['Jennifer_Aniston'] |
snes-02656 | The numbers on a toaster indicate duration of toasting in minutes, and not a "degree of toastiness." | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/a-toaster-dial-is-for-minutes-not-level-of-toasty-ness/ | null | Technology | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Does a Toaster Dial Set Minutes Rather Than ‘Level of Toasty-ness’? | 2 September 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-13180 | It's four or five states where the number of insurance options have narrowed under the Affordable Care Act. | false | /florida/statements/2016/oct/26/debbie-wasserman-schultz/debbie-wasserman-schultz-incorrectly-says-only-4-o/ | Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., had to play defense over the Affordable Care Act -- sometimes called Obamacare -- during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Oct. 25. The previous afternoon, the federal government had announced that premiums for plans under the act would rise an average of 22 percent in 2017. While most plan-holders would see their federal subsidies increase to ease the premium hike, the news was an unwelcome development for Democrats, especially in the final days of an election season. On CNN, Blitzer asked Wasserman Schultz about the hikes, saying, "that’s not the way it was supposed to be, was it?" She responded, "Well, we're in a transition year, and as I said, you have 91 percent of … previously uninsured Americans in Florida who are eligible for a tax credit, which brings those costs down. So those numbers are really an anomaly. It's four or five states where the number of insurance options have narrowed and so premiums have increased, but we're going to be able to make sure that if we just sit down together and iron out the kinks that have occurred with Obamacare." The part that caught our eye had to do with the decline in the number of insurers offering policies under the Affordable Care Act, which is considered one of the factors driving the rise in premiums. Is Wasserman Schultz correct that "it's four or five states where the number of insurance options have narrowed"? Actually, it’s more than that. Data released in the same Department of Health and Human Services report that unveiled the 22-percent projected premium increase showed that at least 29 states have fewer plan issuers in 2017 than they did in 2016 -- many more than Wasserman Schultz had said. (An issuer is defined as a company that offers insurance plans on a state's exchange.) Here’s a list of the states that are seeing a decrease in companies offering plans under the act between 2016 and 2017. State Issuers in 2016 Issuers in 2017 Decline, 2016 to 2017 Alabama 3 1 -2 Alaska 2 1 -1 Arizona 8 2 -6 Arkansas 5 4 -1 California 12 11 -1 Connecticut 4 2 -2 Florida 10 7 -3 Georgia 9 5 -4 Illinois 9 5 -4 Indiana 8 4 -4 Kansas 4 3 -1 Louisiana 5 4 -1 Massachusetts 11 10 -1 Michigan 14 10 -4 Minnesota 5 4 -1 Mississippi 3 2 -1 Missouri 7 4 -3 North Carolina 3 2 -1 Nebraska 4 2 -2 New Jersey 6 3 -3 Ohio 16 11 -5 Oklahoma 2 1 -1 Oregon 9 6 -3 Pennsylvania 13 8 -5 South Carolina 4 1 -3 Tennessee 4 3 -1 Texas 19 10 -9 Utah 4 3 -1 Wisconsin 16 15 -1 States not listed above either saw no change in insurers offering plans, saw an increase in insurers, or had complications that make comparisons tricky. Including all states for which data is available, the number of issuers dropped from 298 in 2016 to 228 in 2017, a decrease of about 23 percent. Nationally, the number of insurers exiting a state outpaced the number of insurers newly entering a state by a factor of more than 5-to-1. Geoff Burgan, press secretary for Wasserman Schultz, did not contest that the number is higher than what she said, instead arguing that "while some states are seeing decreases in insurers, nearly 80 percent of marketplace customers will be able to choose between competing insurers – which is a sharp contrast to the time before the Affordable Care Act became law." Our ruling Wasserman Schultz said, "It's four or five states where the number of insurance options have narrowed" under the Affordable Care Act. According to official federal data, she’s way off, because 29 states have seen the number of insurance options narrowed. We rate her statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/4cc846e0-1d46-443d-806c-c70caaa2a785 | null | Debbie Wasserman Schultz | null | null | null | 2016-10-26T11:42:41 | 2016-10-25 | ['None'] |
pomt-02941 | Soldiers Donating to Tea Party Now Face Punishment Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. | pants on fire! | /rhode-island/statements/2013/oct/30/rhode-island-tea-party/rhode-island-tea-party-says-soldiers-who-donate-te/ | Nothing gets the blood boiling like the discovery that the government is violating basic constitutional rights. So amid the avalanche of tweets we see each day, this one from the Rhode Island Tea Party immediately caught our attention: "Soldiers Donating to Tea Party Now Face Punishment Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice." If true, we thought, that's outrageous. The tweet refers to a story at RedFlagNews.com, which had a different word for it. Here's their headline: "TERRIFYING! Soldiers Donating to Tea Party Now Face Punishment Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice . . . " The story says that two anonymous soldiers said they were told during a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood in Texas that evangelical Christians and members of the tea party were threats to the nation, so any soldier donating to them would be subject to punishment. But the story also quotes a Fort Hood spokesman as saying that, based on a preliminary investigation, the claim reported by Red Flag News "is not substantiated by unit leadership and soldiers present at this training venue." The story, under a different headline, is repeated at FoxNews.com. We quickly found that, under military regulations, there are limitations to the political activities that soldiers can engage in, but none this extreme. Most are intended to avoid the impression that the Department of Defense is endorsing a political party or candidate. For example, while they can have a political bumper sticker on their private vehicles, they cannot post a large political sign, banner, or poster on their cars or trucks. Service members are allowed to donate to campaigns and political parties as private individuals, subject to the same laws that apply to all federal employees. When we asked the Department of Defense about the tea party tweet and the Red Flag headline, spokesman Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale, called it "an absurdity of such outlandish proportion, it's almost difficult to take seriously. "But it's also a kind of un-American, potentially dangerous fear-mongering," he said, "and so I'd like to be as clear as I can here: Service members may donate to any legal cause they choose, and, as long as they do so within the boundaries of the Hatch Act, may involve themselves (out of uniform, without using government equipment, off duty, in a way that implies no government endorsement) in the political process, regardless of party affiliation." (The Hatch Act is a federal anti-corruption law that restricts the political activities of federal employees. But even those who are not allowed to engage in partisan politics are still permitted to contribute money to political organizations.) When we contacted the Rhode Island Tea Party to ask about the Twitter message, President Susan Wynne said in a email, "I was merely sharing the story and is not an endorsement by RI Tea Party. If you find any other information, I'd be happy to see it." If the tweet was wrong, she said in a subsequent email, it would be deleted. We sent her a copy of Breasseale's statement. Four days later, the tweet was still there. At PolitiFact, we believe people and parties have an obligation to check things out before they blindly pass them along to others. It's true that Red Flag News (motto: "Aggregating the News that Mainstream Media Distort and Ignore") originated the over-the-top headline. But Wynne, on behalf of her organization, chose to repeat it, even when the story itself included facts that should have prompted some skepticism. For that reason, we rate the Rhode Island Tea Party's tweet a Pants on Fire! (If you have a claim you’d like PolitiFact Rhode Island to check, e-mail us at politifact@providencejournal.com. And follow us on Twitter: @politifactri.) | null | Rhode Island Tea Party | null | null | null | 2013-10-30T00:01:00 | 2013-10-25 | ['None'] |
pomt-09322 | When the United States "first created the federal income tax, frankly, nobody below a million dollars a year paid anything." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/apr/14/newt-gingrich/gingrich-says-only-millionaires-paid-first-us-inco/ | On April 8, 2010 -- one week before tax-filing day -- former House speaker (and possible 2012 presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich made a comment about the history of U.S. taxes that caught our eye. In a question-and-answer period following a speech to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, the Georgia Republican said that when the United States "first created the federal income tax, frankly, nobody below a million dollars a year paid anything." The first federal income tax was imposed during the Civil War, but it was scrapped in 1872 and not revived until 1913, after ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. Gingrich's camp didn't respond to an inquiry, so we weren't able to ask which tax he meant. But we'll analyze his comment based on the 1913 tax. Several experts we spoke to agreed that income and tax data from the 1860s ranges from unreliable to nonexistent, and wouldn't be comparable to current statistics. In addition, the 1913 tax is the direct predecessor of the current tax system. (The first tax form in 1913 was even called the 1040.) The 1913 federal income tax had seven tax brackets, according to the Tax Foundation. Taxpayers (either individual or joint filers) who had taxable income from zero to $20,000 were taxed at a rate of 1 percent. Those between $20,000 and $50,000 were taxed at 2 percent; between $50,000 and $75,000, 3 percent; $75,000 and $100,000, 4 percent; $100,000 to $250,000, 5 percent; $250,000 to $500,000, 6 percent; and higher than $500,000, 7 percent. Right off the bat, this would seem to make Gingrich's statement incorrect, since anyone earning even one dollar in income would, by the book, be subject to the income tax. But it's actually a bit more complicated. For one thing, that line of thinking ignores exemptions. Individuals and joint filers in 1913, just like taxpayers today, could exempt a portion of their income from the federal tax. According to the 1913 tax form, individuals could exempt their first $3,000, while joint filers could exempt their first $4,000. So that set a floor for who was on the hook for taxes in 1913. As for what constitutes a "millionaire," Gingrich didn't specify, but we think he meant millionaires in 2010 dollars. (It makes for a more favorable calculation for him.) According to an online Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator, the 1913 equivalent of $1 million in today's money was $45,677. So, joint filers earning between $4,000 and $45,677 were liable for the federal income tax -- at either the 1 percent or 2 percent level -- but were less affluent than a "millionaire" in today's dollars, which was Gingrich's cutoff point. The fact that these Americans paid taxes make Gingrich's comment wrong on its face. Still, his general point might not be too misleading if an extremely small number of people fell into that income range. It's possible to estimate how many taxpayers would have fallen into that income category by looking at a well-known academic study of U.S. income distribution published in 2004 by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. The authors provide tables that examine the top end of the income distribution. (For clarity's sake, we'll list the 1913 dollar figures that we reverse-engineered from the Piketty and Saez tables, which are denominated in 2000 dollars.) Looking at their tables, we see that an income of $45,677 (remember, that's enough to qualify as a 1913 "millionaire") would have placed a taxpayer in the top one-tenth of 1 percent of American incomes. Meanwhile, the tables indicate that the top 1 percent of incomes began at $10,466. Their tables don't provide a figure for the top 10 percent, but working backward from the levels they do list beginning in 1917, it seems reasonable to assume that an income of roughly $2,284 would have landed a taxpayer in the top 10 percent of income. Using a back-of-the-envelope estimate, then, a couple with $4,000 income in 1913 probably would have ranked in the best-compensated 4 to 6 percent of Americans. So that means that perhaps 5 percent of Americans weren't millionaires, and yet were subject to the federal income tax. That's equivalent to several million households among the 97 million people estimated by the Census to be living in the U.S. in 1913. That number could drop a bit once other deductions are factored in, such as interest paid on loans. But the number is probably pretty close to that. Where does this leave us? Gingrich has a point that lots of taxpayers were indeed fully exempt from federal taxation in 1913. The exemption levels were equal to nearly $66,000 and $88,000, respectively, in today's dollars -- incomes that today would place one comfortably into the middle class. But to us, it's not enough to make up for his ignoring several million Americans when he claimed that "nobody below a million dollars a year paid anything" in federal income taxes. Someone who earns $88,000 is far from a millionaire. So we rate his statement False. | null | Newt Gingrich | null | null | null | 2010-04-14T22:01:10 | 2010-04-08 | ['United_States'] |
tron-01904 | The Man Who Owed Zero and Had to Pay Zero to Correct His Bill | unproven! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/zerobill/ | null | humorous | null | null | null | The Man Who Owed Zero and Had to Pay Zero to Correct His Bill | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03084 | Black Trump Supporter Shot and Killed by Protestors | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/black-trump-supporter-shot-killed-protestors/ | null | politics | null | null | null | Black Trump Supporter Shot and Killed by Protestors | Mar 14, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06575 | Says Texas wildfires are linked to climate change. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2011/sep/28/barack-obama/barack-obama-slams-rick-perry-climate-change-citin/ | During a Sept. 26, 2011, speech at a Democratic National Committee fundraising event in San Jose, Calif., President Barack Obama aimed some attack lines at the Republican Party. "Some of you here may be folks who actually used to be Republican but are puzzled by what’s happened to that party...." Obama said in comments that, according to the White House’s transcript, were punctuated by laughter. "I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change. No, no, it’s true. You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have health care, and booing a service member in Iraq because they’re gay. That’s not reflective of who we are. We’ve had differences in the past, but at some level we’ve always believed, you know what, that we’re not defined by our differences. We’re bound together." After several readers brought it to our attention, we zeroed in on Obama’s comment that "you’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change." The governor in question is Rick Perry of Texas -- one of the leading candidates in the Republican presidential primary and therefore a potential challenger to Obama in his bid for a second term next year. As for the fires Obama mentioned, Texas has been experiencing one of its most severe wildfire seasons in history. According to the Texas Forest Service, 3.8 million acres burned and 2,742 homes were destroyed by wildfires between Nov. 15, 2010 and Sept. 26, 2011. A spokesman for Perry, Mark Miner, thought Obama’s comment was unfair, telling ABC News, "It’s outrageous President Obama would use … the worst fires in state history as a political attack." Asked about Obama’s comments during a Sept. 26 press availability, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Air Force One that the president’s "point was simply that you have severe weather in that state, and the leader of that state questioned whether something that's been well established as a scientific fact is in fact a fact. … (Obama’s) point is that the link between climate and the severe weather that we’ve been experiencing is something that's studied by scientists all the time, and to simply dismiss it is, he believes, not responsible leadership." Despite our readers’ urgings, we gave serious thought to not rating Obama’s comment on the Truth-O-Meter. Obama clearly intended it to be a lighthearted comment, and the audience took it that way, as evidenced by applause noted in the transcript. In addition, the line was a rhetorical aside, not part of a substantive policy address about climate change. But Obama’s comment fit our main qualification for choosing items to fact-check -- would people wonder whether the comment is true? Is it possible to draw a link between a specific weather event, such as the drought in Texas and the wildfires, and global climate change? As it turns out, this question has an interesting answer. First, some background on climate change. Perry is on record expressing skepticism that human actions are causing climate change. During a Republican debate on Sept. 7, 2011, he said that "the science is not settled (on climate change). The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet to me is just nonsense." We also fact-checked a separate comment by Perry "questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question." We ruled Perry’s statements False. As we noted, one of the most oft-cited reports on climate change comes from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is widely considered the leading international organization on climate science. It includes the scientific consensus of thousands of researchers from 194 countries. "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in (human-created) greenhouse gas concentrations," the most recent report states. In the United States, the U.S. Global Change Research Program coordinates and integrates federal research on climate. Its 2009 report mirrored the IPCC's conclusions, and the report directly addressed the question of how climate change could affect weather. "Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies," it said in a summary. "Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage." However, climate-change experts have also long urged caution in assuming that particular weather events are caused or influenced by climate change. Consider a June 2011 paper published by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, an independent research organization. In the paper -- titled "Extreme Weather and Climate Change Understanding the Link, Managing the Risk" -- co-authors Daniel G. Huber and Jay Gulledge write that "when we ask whether climate change ‘caused’ a particular event, we pose a fundamentally unanswerable question." In fact, they say it is "nonsense" to debate a direct climatological link between a single event and the long-term rise in the global average surface temperature. The reason, Huber and Gulledge write, is the distinction between "climate" -- a long-term pattern that averages many weather events over the years -- and a particular weather event. By definition, Huber and Gulledge write, "an isolated event lacks useful information about climate trends. Consider a hypothetical example: Prior to any change in the climate, there was one category 5 hurricane per year, but after the climate warmed for some decades, there were two category 5 hurricanes per year. In a given year, which of the two hurricanes was caused by climate change? Since the two events are indistinguishable, this question is nonsense. It is not the occurrence of either of the two events that matters. The two events together – or more accurately, the average of two events per year – define the change in the climate." What makes the Texas situation an imperfect fit for this general rule is that what’s happening isn’t one wildfire, or even a spate of wildfires. It’s a months-long season of specific weather-related events -- wildfires -- whose roots stem from broader climatic conditions. "It is a combination of unprecedented heat this summer, completely obliterating the previous record; exceptional drought conditions; exceptional soil moisture decreases, which exacerbate the temperature extremes; and, on top of that, extensive wild fires," said Gavin Schmidt, a climate specialist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "These elements cannot be separated. … Extreme heat becomes more common under climate change, and that has consequences, depending on location -- more drought, and more susceptibility to wildfires." Even Gulledge, the co-author of the Pew paper that cautioned against blaming weather events on climate change, said the Texas case may constitute an exception to the rule he laid out. "There is a well-documented link between the earlier start of spring, higher summer temperatures, and drier conditions during summer and fall -- that is, climate change -- and a dramatic increase in wildfire activity in the western U.S. since the late 1980s," he said. "These observations reveal an increase in fire risk due to climate change." Gulledge found it noteworthy that in a recent blog post, John Nielsen-Gammon -- the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University -- suggested a connection between the wildfires and climate change, even if it came with caveats and limitations. On the one hand, Nielsen-Gammon said the low rainfall levels since October 2010 do not appear to have been made "more likely" by global warming. In turn, this rainfall deficit, he estimated, explains most of the excess heat that set the stage for the wildfires. On the other hand, his modeling suggested that global warming did provide an additional contributing factor to the unusually high temperatures. "The impacts of the drought," he concluded, "were enhanced by global warming." What makes this topic so difficult to analyze is that the way the atmosphere works is extremely complicated. Gulledge compared the atmosphere to a car. "Both the atmosphere and a car are complex systems, but one is fundamentally predictable, while the other is fundamentally unpredictable," he said. "A given force applied to the atmosphere has many different potential outcomes, not a single calculable outcome. That’s different from an automobile, which can be predicted very precisely. If I step on the gas, it will speed up; if I turn the wheel, the car will turn. Consequently, weather forecasters give percentage chances of rain instead of performing a single calculation that predicts a single amount of rain in a given place on a given day." A related complication is that this boils down to a question of probabilities rather than certainties. "The right question to ask is, ‘Has global warming increased the likelihood of an event like the Texas drought occurring’ And the answer to that question is yes," said Brian Soden, a professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami. "While droughts occur in a climate unaffected by human activities, a warming climate increases the likelihood that they will occur." He offers an analogy that he credits to a colleague, Tony Broccoli of Rutgers University. "Consider a baseball player who goes through a rigorous off-season training program, which results in greater strength and faster bat speed," Soden said. "On his first at bat of the season, he hits a home run. Would you say that the home run was a result of his off season training? No one can answer that question. But would you say that the off-season training increased the likelihood of it occurring? Yes." Rob Jackson, the director of the Duke Center on Global Change, acknowledges this backdrop of uncertainty. "Can anyone say with certainty that this is climate-change related? Absolutely not," he said. But Jackson -- who went to college and taught in Texas and continues to visit frequently to see family -- suggested that the scale of the Texas wildfires is starting to change the minds of some scientists who have traditionally been hesitant to blame specific weather events on climate change. "The heat and drought I saw in August is almost enough to make me say that climate change is playing a role, amplifying other factors," Jackson said. "I've never said that before about any weather event." Our ruling Historically, scientists have drawn a clear distinction between specific weather events and longer-range changes in climate, and that sentiment persists. Normally, we would be extremely skeptical of claims linking specific weather events to climate change. However, the situation in Texas that Obama was referring to could be described as something broader than a specific weather event, and there is peer-reviewed evidence linking broader climate change in the American southwest with the incidence of wildfires in the region. The Texas state climatologist recently wrote that he believes climate change has had an effect in encouraging the current wildfires, but only as a modest contributing factor. This caution, combined with the difficulty of determining cause and effect in a system as complex as the earth’s atmosphere, leads us to rate Obama’s claim Half True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2011-09-28T18:06:53 | 2011-09-26 | ['None'] |
tron-01288 | Lincoln Schools Purple Penguin Gender Claims | truth! & fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/purple-penguins/ | null | education | null | null | null | Lincoln Schools Purple Penguin Gender Claims | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
tron-01892 | Green Moon Can Be Seen in April 2017 | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/green-moon-can-seen-april-2017/ | null | humorous | null | null | ['astronomy', 'space'] | Green Moon Can Be Seen in April 2018 | Apr 19, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-04323 | Says "the typical homeowner will pay $4 more per month" if library district passes. | true | /oregon/statements/2012/oct/26/libraries-yes-committee/will-multnomah-county-library-tax-district-cost-ty/ | When it comes to voting for or against increased taxes, it’s helpful to know exactly what the bottom line is. Just how much will this mean out of my pocket? Supporters of a new Multnomah County Library District -- the Libraries Yes! Committee -- tried to put the tax measure in some context in a recent mailer. "The typical homeowner will pay $4 more per month than the amount we currently pay." We thought it was worth a quick check to see just what the measure’s impact would be for the average homeowner. We spoke with Liz Kaufman, who is handling media for the campaign, to see how it arrived at the $4 mark. She directed us to the measure’s explanatory statement written by Multnomah County Attorney Jenny Morf. In the statement, Morf wrote that "If approved, the Multnomah County Library District will be formed with a permanent rate up to $1.24 per $1000 of assessed value. The typical homeowner will pay $49 a year above the cost of the current levy or $.89 per $1000 assessed value." So that extra 35 cents per $1,000 of assessed value would mean an extra $49 a year. Divide that by 12 and you get $4.08. The math checks out. Next we examined what constitutes a "typical" homeowner. According to Multnomah County, the median assessed home value for the county is $149,920. Homeowners at that level are paying just over $11 a month, or $133 a year, at the current 89-cent rate. That would get bumped up by about $4 to $15.50 -- or $185 annually -- if the tax district passes. We ran the numbers again, just to be safe, with the average assessed value, which is higher, about $178,000. At that number, homeowners currently pay $13.20 a month and can expect to pay $18.40 a month if the measure passes -- $5.20 more. By the way, homeowners won’t see the full increase immediately. For the first five years, they would actually be charged $1.18 for each $1,000 of assessed value. After that, it starts to climb to the maximum $1.24. While the ultimate cost would be more for the average house, we think it’s fair to call the median number, where half the houses are assessed at more and half less, "typical." Those figures back up the Libraries Yes! Committee’s claim that the typical homeowner will pay $4 more per month" once the new district goes into full effect. We rate this claim True. | null | Libraries Yes! Committee | null | null | null | 2012-10-26T15:32:16 | 2012-10-21 | ['None'] |
pomt-00414 | North Carolina is one of "very few states" that give the governor sole discretion to pick judges. | mostly true | /north-carolina/statements/2018/aug/29/tim-moore/moore-says-constitutional-amendment-puts-nc-line-o/ | There must be a shift in the universe if all of the living former North Carolina governors, both Democratic and Republican, come together to take a stand against the actions of the General Assembly. What exactly is that cosmic force? A constitutional amendment that would take away the governor’s sole power to appoint judges during vacancies, and hand it over to the General Assembly. Democrats have decried the proposal as a seismic power shift, and a three-panel judge three-judge panel recently told the legislature (which is controlled by Republicans) to rewrite the amendment language. How radical is this power shift, really? Not very, says House Speaker Tim Moore. Moore said on Aug. 24 that the proposed constitutional amendment "actually puts us in line with what most other states do. Very few states allow a governor unilateral and sole discretion to pick those judges who continue to serve." What the proposal would change Currently, in North Carolina, the governor has the full discretion to appoint someone to fill a vacant judicial seat to serve until the next general election. Judges in North Carolina are selected through partisan elections. The constitutional amendment, if it passes, would lead to the creation of a Nonpartisan Judicial Merit Commission of no more than nine members. The members of the commission would be picked by the governor, the General Assembly and the state’s chief justice. The commission would verify that all candidates who apply are legally qualified and assess their merit, without regard for party affiliation. The list of candidates then would go to the General Assembly, and lawmakers would pick at least two for the governor to choose from. Is this a revolutionary change? Not really. What other states do When PolitiFact reached out to Moore’s office, spokesperson Joseph Kyzer cited a Ballotpedia page that says "34 states and the District of Columbia use some variation of assisted appointment." The Ballotpedia information includes all states that use a merit commission in some form, including for first-term appointments, judicial vacancies or in combination with other methods. According to data from the New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, most states do actually have some type of merit commission in place to help select judges. When filling a state Supreme Court vacancy, 34 states do use some type of merit nominating commission during the process according to the data from the Brennan Center. Only seven states currently allow the governor to directly fill state Supreme Court vacancies: Alabama, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Arkansas and Washington. When filling vacancies in state appellate courts, the Brennan Center reports, 23 states use a nominating commission. Meanwhile, 34 states use nominating commissions to fill vacant judgeships in trial courts. Types of merit selection It sounds as if most states do have some type of merit nominating commission, although there are a few differences in how they operate. Missouri was the first state to have a merit commission in 1940. Its setup is often regarded as the "gold standard" merit commission plan. The Missouri State Bar, Governor and Supreme Court have an equal share in choosing commission members. Those members then elect who the head of the commission will be. The Missouri legislature has no say in the matter. Bill Raftery, a senior analyst at the National Center for State Courts, says some don’t have the Missouri plan in place because states interpret "merit commission" differently and with varying degrees of involvement from legislators. He said because of that the term "merit commission" can be misleading by suggesting that a third party is involved in selecting judges. In the proposed North Carolina commission, the General Assembly, Governor and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would select the commission members. The state’s current Chief Justice is Mark Martin, a Republican. He was elected in 2014 for an eight year term. According to information from the nonpartisan American Judicature Society, seven states give their legislature some type of role in appointing commission members. An NC nominating commission That’s not the only major difference between the proposed North Carolina commission and other commissions. In the proposed amendment, the role of the commission would be to make sure the candidates are qualified to fill judicial vacancies, as prescribed by the law, without regard to their party affiliation. The commission’s evaluation would then be sent to the General Assembly, who will choose at least two candidates for the governor to choose from. "The nominating commission is only tasked with determining if the applicants meet the legal qualifications to be a judge, which is different than how nominating commissions are used in other states," said Douglas Keith, counsel in the Democracy program for the New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. Stephen Ware, a law professor at the University of Kansas, says that, based on the description in the ballot, the merit commission would play a less powerful role than in other states if its objective is to check "legal requirements as opposed to assessing the pros and cons of applicants and making the hard choices of who would be better." In fact, most merit commissions are tasked with "narrowing down a pool of applicants to a few finalists" for the governor or legislature to select from says Ware. Our ruling Despite differences among the states in how commissions operate, Moore’s statement is mostly true. Most states do in fact have some type of merit commission in place, and these commissions do play a role in appointing judges during vacancies. However, the proposed North Carolina merit commission would have a different role than in most other states. Its primary job would be to make sure candidates are legally qualified to serve as judges, rather than vet applicants. This story was produced by the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project, a partnership of McClatchy Carolinas, the Duke University Reporters’ Lab and PolitiFact. The NC Local News Lab Fund and the International Center for Journalists provide support for the project, which shares fact-checks with newsrooms statewide. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Tim Moore | null | null | null | 2018-08-29T16:53:34 | 2018-08-24 | ['None'] |
pomt-04990 | Says Jeff Brandes voted to allow state-run Citizens Property Insurance to dump policies onto "out-of-state, unregulated private companies." | mostly true | /florida/statements/2012/jul/20/committee-protect-florida/mailer-calls-out-jeff-brandes-supporting-measure-d/ | A mailer circulating in Tampa Bay targets St. Petersburg Rep. Jeff Brandes over a vote he took on Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-run company that covers more Floridians than any property insurer. Brandes is running in the Republican primary for Senate District 22 against Rep. Jim Frishe, a 12-year House member who is backed by the electioneering group that sponsored the mailer, the Committee to Protect Florida. The GOP in District 22 is one of the most closely watched in the state. The piece features an exasperated, white-haired man at his kitchen table, his palm to his forehead, distraught over a letter he received from Citizens. Text wrapped around the image reads: Jeff Brandes would let Citizens dump some policies...and sell out homeowners who trusted him. Hurricanes. Sinkholes. Higher costs, weaker coverage and rejected claims. Every Bay-area homeowner is facing big, expensive risks in today’s volatile insurance market. Jeff Brandes wants to add another risk we can’t afford. He voted to allow Citizens -- the state’s largest property insurer -- to dump policies onto out-of-state, unregulated private companies. Policy holders would be stuck with no control... and all the cost! For us? Brandes votes in Tallahassee for them. He fights for big insurance and sides with special Interests. The fact is, with a voting record like his, Jeff Brandes is the biggest risk of all. At hand is one of the diciest issues of the 2012 legislative session. The measure (HB 245) would have allowed "surplus lines" companies to take over Citizens policies in an effort to shrink the company. These companies, which Democrats likened to vultures, are not overseen by the state Office of Insurance Regulation and usually have higher premiums. Many Republicans, including Gov. Rick Scott, say Citizens would be overexposed should a calamitous storm hit the state. (Read this PolitiFact Florida story for more information about the company’s financial health.) Basically, many Republicans believe that Citizens does not have the ability to pay out claims in the event of the storm, which would leave the state in a disastrous position. So it’s better to move policyholders to other more stable companies, they say, even if it means higher premiums. They also note that Citizens was created as an insurer of last resort but has grown to be the state’s largest property insurer. Supporters of the bill pointed to a few consumer-minded safeguards, such as requiring companies to have at least $50 million in surplus and the financial strength to withstand two hurricanes. Opponents said homeowners would be out of luck should such a company became insolvent, though, because it would not be covered by the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association. The version that passed a full vote of the House on Feb. 3, 2012, would have automatically moved policyholders to a surplus lines company if they did not opt out within 30 days notice. (Dissatisfied customers could return to Citizens later.) The House approved the measure 66-48. Frishe voted No; Brandes voted Yes. That’s key to this fact-check, but there’s a little more to the story. When the Florida Senate considered the proposal, it altered the bill be more consumer-friendly. The Senate made the measure "opt-in," meaning a consumer had to proactively approve the switch with a signature. Supporters of the original proposal argued that the change would gut the intent of the bill: to reduce the number of policies held by Citizens. And when the amended bill bounced back to the House, Republican House members proposed to reject the opt-in provision and kick the bill back to the Senate. But that idea failed in the the closest House vote of the session. Both Brandes and Frishe voted against blocking the Senate’s opt-in amendment. With the opt-in provision now part of the bill, the House sponsor said the proposal "might as well be dead" and decided not to bring it for a full vote. Brandes, reached by phone, said he voted for the original version because "we have to take serious measures in order to reduce the exposure literally to the citizens of the state." However, he said he was "happier" with an opt-in requirement -- which explains his vote when the bill resurfaced. That point doesn’t matter to Roger "Rockie" Pennington, chairman of the Committee to Protect Florida, the group behind the mailer. "When he had a chance to stand up for consumers, he stood with citizens and out-of-state, unregulated insurers," Pennington said. Our ruling As the ad claims, Brandes voted for a measure that would have allowed out-of-state companies to pluck Citizens policyholders in an effort to lessen Citizens’ liability in the event of a big storm. A month later, after the Senate included a provision that would require policyholders to opt-in to the program, House members made a motion to reject that change, and Brandes voted not to reject the opt-in provision. With the opt-in provision part of the bill, the House decided to scuttle the proposal for 2012. The claim from the Committee to Protect Florida is accurate but needs additional information, which is our definition of Mostly True. | null | Committee to Protect Florida | null | null | null | 2012-07-20T10:43:08 | 2012-07-18 | ['None'] |
clck-00042 | Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has helped raise global food production and reduce poverty. | unsupported | https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/wall-street-journal-op-ed-ignores-evidence-negative-impacts-increasing-co2/ | null | null | null | null | null | Wall Street Journal op-ed ignores evidence of negative impacts of increasing CO2 | [' Rodney Nichols, The Wall Street Journal, 31 Oct. 2016 \xa0 '] | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06103 | Georgia’s unemployment rate has exceeded the national rate for 50 consecutive months. | true | /georgia/statements/2012/jan/04/buddy-carter/georgia-unemployment-rate-higher-nation/ | State lawmaker Buddy Carter wants to help more Georgians find jobs. In the process, he gave us some work to do. Carter, a Republican senator from Pooler, located near Savannah, wrote a column on his website in mid-December full of numbers and data highlighting Georgia’s high unemployment rate. There was one claim in it that we found particularly curious. "Currently, Georgia’s unemployment rate stands at 10.2 [percent] while the national rate is at 9 [percent]. Perhaps even more disturbing is that Georgia’s unemployment rate has exceeded the national rate for 50 consecutive months," he wrote. Has the state’s unemployment rate been higher than the national rate for 50 straight months? We chose the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to check out the senator’s claim. The federal agency keeps detailed data on unemployment for the nation and each state (the numbers include job growth or decline in various industries) and is used by most economists. When Carter wrote his column, October 2011 was the most recent month that the bureau had unemployment data for Georgia and the nation. That month, the unemployment rate in the state was 10.2 percent. The unemployment rate for the entire country was 9 percent. In each month of 2011, the unemployment rate in Georgia ranged between a high of 10.3 percent in January and September and a low of 9.8 percent, which was recorded in April and May. The highest national monthly unemployment rate was recorded in June, at 9.2 percent. So far, Carter is correct, which is 10 months. How about 2010? Carter was right. The highest monthly national rate was 9.8 percent, which was recorded in April and November. The unemployment rate for Georgia those months were 10.1 and 10.4 percent, respectively. Georgia’s unemployment rate for the other 10 months of 2010 was at least 0.5 percentage points higher than the nation. That adds up to 22 months of a higher unemployment rate for the Peach State. Let’s go to 2009. Georgia’s unemployment rate rose steadily from 8.5 percent in January to 10.4 percent in October, November and December. Again, Georgia had a higher unemployment rate than the nation in each month of that year. The closest Georgia came to having a lower rate than the nation was May, when the state’s rate was 9.6 percent and the national rate was 9.4 percent. OK, so when was the last time the nation’s unemployment rate was the same or eclipsed Georgia’s? Answer: July 2007. In that month, the national rate and Georgia’s were 4.7 percent, according to the BLS. Carter was correct. We rate the claim in his column as True. | null | Buddy Carter | null | null | null | 2012-01-04T06:00:00 | 2011-12-13 | ['None'] |
snes-05868 | A photograph shows a pregnant woman waiting to welcome home a military husband who couldn't have fathered the child she's carrying. | miscaptioned | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/miscaptioned-welcome-home-daddy/ | null | Fauxtography | null | David Mikkelson | null | Welcome Home, Daddy! | 11 March 2010 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03049 | Forty-six states have a line-item veto for the governor. | mostly true | /rhode-island/statements/2013/oct/06/lincoln-chafee/ri-gov-lincoln-chafee-says-governors-46-states-hav/ | In a Sept. 22 interview on WPRI-Channel 12’s "Newsmakers," the subject of the Rhode Island State Constitution and the relative powers of the governor and General Assembly came up. Governor Lincoln Chafee said on the show that "nothing could be more important" than to assign more power to the governor, who, in Rhode Island, is institutionally weak relative to the Assembly. "Line-item veto is a perfect example. Everything goes in the budget the last minute. If the governor vetoes the whole budget, it’s going to be overridden in a millisecond," he said. "But if you can line-item veto, like 46 other states have, then that becomes a public discussion about that narrow issue" and the governor might be able to prevail. Is Chafee correct that a large majority -- 46 of 50 states -- give their governors the line-item veto? We thought we’d test his knowledge of the states. First, let’s define the term "line-item veto." It allows a chief executive to prevent from becoming law a particular provision of a bill approved by a legislature, including a budget bill, while allowing the rest of the bill to take effect. In Rhode Island, it takes a three-fifths majority vote of both branches of the General Assembly to override a governor’s veto. The three-fifths requirement, rather than the simple majority necessary to pass a bill initially, is a higher threshold that gives a governor an improved chance to win in a disagreement. In order for the governor to gain the line-item veto, a Constitutional Convention would have to be called, the convention delegates would have to propose that change to voters, and they would have to approve the change. A convention typically is convened by a vote of the electorate every 10 years. Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis has said that he intends to put a convention call on the general election ballot in 2014. So, back to our test of Chafee’s claim that 46 states have a line-item veto. We went to "The Book of the States," 2013 edition, published by the Council of State Governments. It lists 44 states in which the governor has a line-item veto for all bills or at least for bills appropriating money. Besides Rhode Island, the only states lacking it are Nevada, Indiana, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Vermont. The "Book of the States" information is based on state-by-state surveys completed in December 2012. So we contacted the National Council of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association to make sure nothing has changed since. It hasn’t, they say. Our ruling Governor Lincoln Chafee said governors in 46 states have line-item veto power. But a definitive and up-to-date source, The Book of the States, says 44 have it. He is very close. The judges rate his claim Mostly True. | null | Lincoln Chafee | null | null | null | 2013-10-06T00:01:00 | 2013-09-22 | ['None'] |
hoer-00127 | Rehana 27 From Leicister Hacker Warning | bogus warning | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/rehana-hacker-hoax.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Rehana 27 From Leicister Hacker Warning Hoax | 25th June 2010 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11447 | The last private rocket launch "cost $80 million. If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40 or 50 times that amount of money. I mean, literally." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/mar/12/donald-trump/trump-takes-dig-nasa-extols-private-rocketeers/ | President Donald Trump looked to the stars, or at least near-Earth orbit, to cite yet another example of the private sector getting things done better and cheaper than the government. With rocket models decorating the table where Trump and his Cabinet met March 8, Trump singled out the private operators. "Rich guys, they love rocket ships, and that's good," Trump said. "That's better than us paying for it. And I noticed the prices of the last one, that they said it cost $80 million. If the government did it, the same thing would have cost probably 40 or 50 times that amount of money. I mean, literally." We thought about Trump’s cost-multiplier estimate and wondered if it would cost NASA $3.2 billion to do what the private rockets do. The comparison is a stretch for several reasons, but as Jason Davis at the Planetary Society put it, the main one is "it’s sort of like comparing a Ford Focus to a Cadillac Escalade." The private rockets don’t need to go higher than low-Earth orbit. SpaceX, for example, carries supplies to the International Space Station, which is about 250 miles above the earth. With the shorter distance, the rockets can be smaller. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is about 230 feet high. NASA has left that closer-in zone to the private firms since 2006. Its field of play reaches further out, to the moon and beyond. NASA has been developing the Space Launch System, a veritable beast of a rocket where the shortest configuration is 322 feet tall. With that in mind, let’s look at the dollars. The private price tag The list price of the most basic SpaceX rocket, the Falcon 9, is $62 million. If you want more lift, the Falcon Heavy goes for $90 million. So $80 million is a reasonable midpoint. Davis noted, though, that prices can run higher. "The Air Force paid $97 million for the Falcon 9 that launched the DSCOVR climate satellite," he said. The key here is that this price tag covers the cost of producing and operating the rocket for each launch. Part of the money goes to recover the cost of designing and developing the rocket, and for that, it’s important to note that NASA and the companies shared the tab. In 2011, to ensure that two companies, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, had the capacity to supply the International Space Station, Congress provided $821 million, or about 44 percent of what it took to develop and test the commercial systems. That government investment made it easier for the firms to be commercially viable. Joshua Colwell, professor of planetary science and assistant director of the Florida Space Institute, told us having a guaranteed buyer also helped. "SpaceX got to where it is in part thanks to lots of government contracts to send supplies to the International Space Station," Colwell said. The NASA price tag NASA is building the Space Launch System to do much more than the private rockets. It will be safe enough to carry astronauts in a capsule called Orion — a separate huge expense in its own right — or pure cargo. As for distance, the minimum range is the moon, or about 239,000 miles from Earth, in contrast to the 250 miles distance to the International Space Station. An artist’s rendition of the Space Launch System carrying the Orion capsule in to space. (NASA) This big rocket and its Orion capsule are scheduled for their first voyage in 2020. So, as a practical matter, there is no ongoing series of launches to compare to the private operators. There are a few ways to tackle the question. Davis at the Planetary Society looked at the development cost. "The Space Launch System currently costs NASA more than $2 billion per year, and it's still under development," Davis said. "It will go on two test flights over the next five years, so I suppose you could calculate that you're paying about $5 billion per flight." On the other hand, this big rocket could be used more often over a longer stretch of time. The website Ars Technica is into rocket science and rocket budgets. In 2016, it estimated development and operation costs of $60 billion for the rocket, the Orion capsule and infrastructure on the ground at the Kennedy Space Center over the next two decades. Assuming one flight each year, the package cost of rocket, capsule and ground operations would come to $3 billion per flight. Ars Technica relayed a much slimmer price tag from NASA manager Bill Hill. In 2016, Hill said he was aiming for an annual cost of $2 billion a year with two flights annually by the end of the 2020s. That would drive the cost down to $1 billion per flight. Again, this is neither certain nor directly comparable to today’s private launches. Colwell puts no stock in Trump’s 40-50 times estimate. At the same time, he takes the larger point. "It is probably true that SpaceX is cheaper than an equivalent government-developed rocket, but there is no equivalent government-developed rocket." We reached out to the White House and did not hear back. Our ruling Trump said that at $80 million per launch, private rockets are about 40 to 50 times cheaper than NASA would spend if it did "the same thing." The $80 million figure is roughly accurate, but the key flaw in the statement is that NASA is not doing the same thing. As part of a policy decision made a decade ago, NASA has left the shorter distance work to the private sector while it focuses on getting to the moon and beyond. We found a wide range of approaches and estimates of what it would cost to launch the Space Launch System on a year-in-year-out basis. The answers on the high end backed up Trump’s remark. The answers on the low end suggested he exaggerated. But fundamentally, this is a comparison between a Ford Fusion and a Cadillac Escalade. One will be much more expensive than the other, but they are used in very different ways. We rate this claim Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com What do you think? PolitiFact Democratic guest columnist and former U.S. Rep. David Altmire took issue with this fact-check, saying Trump's literal words "were simply too far off to earn the benefit of the doubt" and should have earned a False rating. Read his critique here. Read more about our guest columnists here. | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-03-12T17:59:22 | 2018-03-08 | ['None'] |
pomt-06003 | Says PolitiFact has said he "kept a campaign promise to toughen ethics rules." | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/19/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-kept-campaign-promise-toughen-et/ | In a 30-second ad released Jan. 18, 2012, President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign touts his record on several issues, including ethics. "President Obama kept his promise to toughen ethics rules," a narrator says, as the following text is displayed on the screen: "President Obama ‘kept a campaign promise to toughen ethics rules,’ PolitiFact 1/21/09." With our work cited in a campaign ad, we thought it would be worth checking whether it was cited accurately. We found the article referenced in the ad -- a check in our Obameter that looked at whether the president kept his promise to "issue an executive order banning registered lobbyists or lobbying firms from giving gifts in any amount or any form to executive branch employees." The ad is correct that we rated this a Promise Kept. "In one of his first acts as president," we wrote at the time, "Barack Obama kept a campaign promise to toughen ethics rules, signing an executive order on Jan. 21, 2009. ‘If you are a lobbyist entering my administration, you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on, or in the agencies you lobbied during the previous two years,’ Obama said at the signing ceremony. ‘When you leave government, you will not be able to lobby my administration for as long as I am president. And there will be a ban on gifts by lobbyists to anyone serving in the administration as well.’" We should note that we rated this a Promise Kept one day after Obama took office, based on his signing of the executive order. We have not checked subsequently to see if the executive order has been adhered to. However, since this is all we’ve published on that promise, we think it’s fair for the Obama campaign to have pointed to it. But is this the whole story? Not necessarily. We looked over our promises again and found at least 10 additional promise ratings relevant to the ad’s claim. And on these promises, Obama’s record has been decidedly more mixed. (We determined that five additional promises we had categorized under "ethics" weren’t relevant to the ad’s claim, so we’re excluding them from our calculation. But the ratings for those five are also all over the map, so it doesn’t change our conclusion.) Here’s a rundown of the ethics promises we think are relevant: • Centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters: Promise Broken • Seek independent watchdog agency to investigate congressional ethics violations: Stalled • Create a public "Contracts and Influence" database: Promise Broken • Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Stalled • Require more disclosure and a waiting period for earmarks: Compromise • Make White House communications public: Stalled • Conduct regulatory agency business in public: In the Works • Release presidential records: Promise Kept • Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials: Promise Broken • Require new hires to sign a form affirming their hiring was not due to political affiliation or contributions: Promise Kept Counting the Promise Kept already cited in the ad, the final breakdown for these 11 promises is three rated Promise Kept, one Compromise, one In the Works, three rated Stalled and three rated Promise Broken. So, more than half of those promise are rated either Stalled or Promise Broken. To be able to cite a Promise Kept on ethics, the ad makers cherry-picked just one of at least 11 relevant promise checks they could have chosen from. Our ruling The ad accurately quoted one of our promise checks in saying that Obama "kept a campaign promise to toughen ethics rules." However, it ignored at least 10 other ethics-related promise checks that showed a more mixed record, including three promises rated Stalled and three rated Broken. On balance, we rate the ad Half True. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2012-01-19T15:59:46 | 2012-01-18 | ['None'] |
pomt-03576 | A 0.05 standard for drunken driving means having a glass of wine at dinner could make a person drunk. | mostly true | /wisconsin/statements/2013/may/17/tavern-league-wisconsin/005-glass-wine-could-make-person-legally-drunk-wis/ | On May 14, 2013, a federal agency recommended reducing the threshold for evidence of drunken driving from a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 to 0.05. That means having a glass of wine at dinner might make a person drunk, a spokesman for the Tavern League of Wisconsin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel the same day. Under a BAC standard of 0.05, a person could get nailed for DUI after one drink? Tavern League’s evidence The statement was made by Scott Stenger, a Madison lobbyist whose clients include the tavern league. He told us he based his claim on news articles about the 0.05 recommendation, including a report from the Journal Sentinel and The Associated Press, and a chart on blood-alcohol concentration from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The news covered the recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates transportation accidents and makes recommendations based on its findings. The board said states should cut the current blood-alcohol level for evidence of intoxication as part of a series of ideas aimed at reducing alcohol-related highway deaths. In its report, the Associated Press said 0.05 is "about one drink for a woman weighing less than 120 pounds," and that a drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine, or 1 ounce of 80-proof alcohol "in most studies." Meanwhile, the Texas agency chart that Stenger cited says its BAC data comes from another federal body, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which works to prevent highway crashes. That data says essentially what Stenger and AP did: A 100-pound woman could reach 0.05 after one drink. (Incidentally, both the AP and the chart used by the Texas agency said a 160-pound man could reach 0.05 after consuming two drinks in one hour.) So, there’s evidence that a limited group of drinkers -- women weighing under 120 pounds -- could be legally drunk after one drink, if the standard for drunken driving were reduced to a blood-alcohol level of 0.05. What other evidence is out there? BAC calculators We checked three online calculators that provide blood-alcohol concentration estimates based on various factors, including gender and weight. They generally found a BAC of less than 0.05 for a 100-pound woman consuming one drink. The calculator at the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (which also has a smartphone app), says the BAC would be 0.03. A more detailed calculator from the University of Notre Dame’s Office of Alcohol and Drug Education says the BAC would be 0.04 for a 5-ounce glass of wine, if the wine is red and 12.5 percent alcohol. And the calculator at Central Connecticut State University’s Office of Alcohol and Drug Education says the BAC would be 0.05 after a 5-ounce glass of table wine. So, why do the blood-alcohol concentration figures vary? Well, as we noted, all of the figures are estimates. The Wisconsin DOT also points out that besides gender, weight and the amount of alcohol consumed, other factors are in play. Your BAC will be higher if you drink faster or drink on an empty stomach. Women reach higher BACs faster because they have less water in their bodies and more adipose tissue (fat), which is not easily penetrated by alcohol. Jan Grebel, a chemical test supervisor for the DOT, told us about another factor: If you drink frequently, your liver can break down alcohol more efficiently, but if you don’t, your BAC would be higher after even one drink. Grebel quoted to us from a chart she utilizes when testifying in court in drunken driving cases. She said the chart estimates the BAC at 0.047 -- nearly 0.05 -- for a 100-pound woman after one drink. But Grebel said that would be the maximum BAC in that instance. Most people would not reach 0.05 after one drink, she said. Our rating The Tavern League of Wisconsin said a proposal to make 0.05 the standard for drunken driving would mean that having a glass of wine at dinner could make a person drunk. The statement is accurate, in that it’s possible an individual could reach 0.05 after one drink. But it needs additional information, namely that the situation would apply only in a small number of instances and would depend on other factors, such as drinking on an empty stomach. We rate the statement Mostly True. | null | Tavern League of Wisconsin | null | null | null | 2013-05-17T08:20:33 | 2013-05-14 | ['None'] |
pomt-12691 | He’s only there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is gonna totally upset the new agenda. | pants on fire! | /pennsylvania/statements/2017/mar/14/mike-kelly/western-pa-congressman-backs-strange-obama-shadow-/ | Republican Congressman Mike Kelly was talking to a crowd in his district of Northwestern Pennsylvania earlier this month when he dropped a serious accusation against Barack Obama. He noted the former president had decided to stay in Washington, and not for the reasons Obama has given. "He’s only there for one purpose and one purpose only," Kelly said, "and that is to run a shadow government that is gonna totally upset the new agenda." Is that really what Obama stayed in Washington, D.C. to do? Obama announced late in 2016 he’d be sticking around in Washington for at least two years so his daughter Sasha could finish high school. He has office space paid for by the General Services Administration, a perk granted to all former presidents. According to the Chicago Sun Times, Obama is the first president since Woodrow Wilson to stay at a primary residence in Washington, D.C. after his tenure ended. Obama will be assisting former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a Congressional redistricting effort, work Holder has described as a "going into the states" strategy. Holder also said Obama would be fundraising and interacting with state legislators. No reports or intelligence has been released linking these post-presidency activities of Obama to a shadow government. And Kelly did not provide any evidence. A shadow government is commonly defined as a conflicting, secondary government led by members of the private sector that wields similar influence to the actual government. Kelly later withdrew his comments after they made national news. His spokesperson Tom Qualtere said, "Because of the extraordinary interest in Rep. Kelly’s remarks, it is worth clarifying that Rep. Kelly does not believe that President Obama is personally operating a shadow government." In another statement, Qualtere said, "he was sharing the frustration of everyone in the room over how they believe certain Obama administration holdovers within the federal bureaucracy are attempting to upset President Trump’s agenda." Kelly’s comments and his ensuing walkback landed in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Hill and MSNBC. Aaron Blake, for the Post, wrote "while the conspiracy theory is strange enough, the explanations offered by Kelly's office are something to behold." A spokesperson for Obama did not respond to a request for comment. Our Ruling Congressman Mike Kelly accused President Barack Obama of operating a shadow government, saying he was only staying in Washington, D.C. for that "one purpose and one purpose only." Yet there is no evidence Obama is running a shadow government, and Obama has provided another purpose for why he’s staying in Washington: so his daughter Sasha can finish high school. Kelly’s spokesperson later walked back the Congressman’s statement, saying "Rep. Kelly does not believe that President Obama is personally operating a shadow government." We rule the claim Pants On Fire. Share the Facts Politifact 6 7 Politifact Rating: Pants on Fire "He’s only there for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is gonna totally upset the new agenda." Mike Kelly PA Congressman Northwestern PA Saturday, March 4, 2017 03/04/2017 Read More info | null | Mike Kelly | null | null | null | 2017-03-14T14:03:11 | 2017-03-04 | ['None'] |
chct-00105 | FACT CHECK: Are 80 Percent Of Asylum Court Cases Not Approved? | verdict: true | http://checkyourfact.com/2018/06/29/fact-check-80-percent-asylum/ | null | null | null | Emily Larsen | Fact Check Reporter | null | null | 3:35 PM 06/29/2018 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-11652 | The White House staff risks violating federal ethics rules if they participate in Donald Trump’s "fake news awards." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jan/11/norm-eisen/donald-trumps-fake-news-awards-could-land-white-ho/ | On the campaign trail, Donald Trump honed his craft of slamming media organizations that covered him critically, a practice he’s carried over to the White House. His efforts will culminate soon in the so-called "fake news awards," an idea Trump first floated last November on Twitter. "We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me). They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!" he tweeted Nov. 27, 2017. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Trump’s idea got poor reviews from government watchdogs, who warned White House staff that the event would breach federal ethics rules designed to keep government honest and impartial. "WARNING to White House staff: the president may be exempt from the rules at 5 CFR § 2635.701 et seq. on misuse of position BUT YOU ARE NOT. If you help @potus with the below, you risk violating §§ 702, 704 & 705 forbidding use of gov time & $$$ to harm some media & aid others," Norm Eisen, President Barack Obama's former ethics czar, tweeted on Jan. 7. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com Experts who practiced government ethics at the highest levels told us the fake news awards could land White House staffers in hot water, for violating government rules and encroaching on the First Amendment. Ethics rules Eisen, now chair of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, referred to a set of federal regulations that lay out the ethical conduct of executive branch employees. (As Eisen noted, Trump, as president, is exempt.) These rules are overseen by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, or OGE, an executive branch agency whose 4,500 ethics officials serve as watchdogs over the executive branch to prevent (or resolve) conflicts of interest, with the aim of safeguarding governmental integrity. Eisen specifically pointed to a section of the rules that deal with executive branch employees misusing their government jobs. The section states that an executive branch employee "shall not use his public office for the endorsement of any product or enterprise." Because of that rule, the ethics office also has long considered it improper for an executive branch employee to condemn a company, said Walter Shaub, who led the OGE until his resignation in July 2017. "You can't use your government position to endorse a company, and you can't trash a company to the advantage of a different company," said Shaub, who is now the senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center. It's unclear if Trump’s event is being held by the White House or the Trump/Pence campaign, and neither organization replied to our questions. (Eisen's tweet — and this analysis — deals with official government events. A separate set of laws, including the Hatch Act, would apply if White House staffers participated in a campaign event, sources said.) Would White House staffers’ participation breach ethics rules? Absolutely, according to Shaub, who retweeted Eisen’s warning to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "Hey @PressSec & @RajShah45, Norm is right. If you or ANY WH staffers work on this or post it on the WH website, it will be a violation of the Standards of Conduct. Beware of laws on using federal appropriations too, if there are any visuals, certificates, handouts, or trophies," Shaub tweeted Jan. 7. See Figure 3 on PolitiFact.com Shaub told PolitiFact that a staffers' participation in an official Trump administration event designed to publicly humiliate certain media outlets would clearly constitute a misuse of their government position. "It’s not even a close call," he said. "Sending out tweets talking about how great Fox News is, which is a business, and now he’s going to give awards trashing CNN and others, which are businesses, is preferential treatment." No compelling government interest Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, said that while some ethics rules can be ambiguous, a Trump staffer's participation would be out of bounds. "The endorsement of some news outlets and the condemnation of others crosses the line under the OGE regulations," he said. "It’s hard to show where that line precisely is, but what I can tell you is it has been crossed in this instance." Absent some kind of serious government study showing systemic failures by certain media organizations, there’s no compelling government interest that justifies the staging of fake news awards, he said. ‘Treading really close to a First Amendment problem’ Painter said Trump’s tweets, as well as other administration actions affecting the media industry, raise First Amendment concerns. This makes it more likely an ethics official would find a staffer broke the rules by participating in Trump's fake news awards, he said. During his time in office, scores of Trump’s tweets have followed a familiar pattern: praise for Fox News and scorn for its competitors. On Twitter, Trump mentioned Fox News, its programs or its hosts in more than 70 tweets that describe the right-wing media outlet in positive, if not glowing, terms. Trump uses Twitter to promote Fox News reporting, highlight favorable coverage of him and his administration and lavish praise on the network while condemning their competitors. "The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!" Trump tweeted Feb. 15, 2017. See Figure 4 on PolitiFact.com Over the same period, Trump has mentioned Fox News' rivals more than 50 times. Aside from two tweets promoting his own interview on ABC News, these tweets have ranged from negative to scathing. "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" Trump tweeted Feb. 17, 2017. In addition to Trump's tweets, Painter said there’s other evidence the administration has used its power to play favorites in the media industry, raising First Amendment concerns that bolster the case that the fake news awards are out of bounds. He pointed to the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Time Warner, which has raised questions about whether this was done as retribution against CNN; Trump’s threat against NBC's license over reporting he disputed; and Trump’s repeated — and false — attacks on Amazon and its chairman Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. Painter also noted Trump congratulated Rupert Murdoch, who co-chairs 21st Century Fox, over a deal to sell significant Fox assets to Disney, after Trump reportedly sought reassurance that Fox News wouldn’t change hands. "There's some concrete evidence that they're playing favorites with the media organizations in official action, and penalizing those who do not give them the news coverage they like," Painter said. "Couple that with the president's tweets, including several that suggest he wishes he were in a country without the First Amendment, and this is viewed as a part of a pattern of conduct." Both Painter and Shaub noted the ethics rules also require loyalty to the rule of law and the constitution. "In effect the president is trying to establish official news media, establish that Fox is good and CNN is bad," Painter said. "That does loop back into what's a reasonable application of the OGE rule if what you're doing is treading really close to a First Amendment problem." Eisen and Painter are chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which unsuccessfully sued Trump for violating a constitutional bar on presidents and federal officials accepting gifts and payments from foreign governments. Our ruling Eisen said the White House staff risks violating federal ethics rules if they participate in Donald Trump’s "fake news awards." Two experts, who practiced government ethics at the highest levels, said participation by White House staffers would violate federal ethics rules. Trump, for the record, is exempt. They added that the president and his administration’s pattern of playing favorites among media outlets raises First Amendment issues that would subject this event to heightened scrutiny by ethics officials. We rate this statement True. See Figure 5 on PolitiFact.com | null | Norm Eisen | null | null | null | 2018-01-11T16:18:16 | 2018-01-07 | ['White_House'] |
goop-01527 | Kylie Jenner Did Reveal How “I Got My Body Back,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kylie-jenner-body-back-post-baby-weight-loss/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Kylie Jenner Did NOT Reveal How “I Got My Body Back,” Despite Report | 10:52 am, February 21, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
tron-01816 | Earbuds Lead to Death By Electrocution | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/earbuds-lead-to-death-by-electrocution/ | null | health-medical | null | null | null | Earbuds Lead to Death By Electrocution | Jul 16, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00008 | Killer Insect SOS Alert | bogus warning | http://www.hoax-slayer.net/killer-insect-sos-alert-hoax-warning/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Killer Insect SOS Alert Hoax Warning | January 4, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00265 | Rape Cases Rise Under Modi Govt? How The Congress Got It Wrong | none | https://www.boomlive.in/rape-cases-rise-under-modi-govt-how-the-congress-got-it-wrong/ | null | null | null | null | null | Rape Cases Rise Under Modi Govt? How The Congress Got It Wrong | May 24 2017 2:20 pm, Last Updated: Jun 16 2017 7:24 pm | null | ['None'] |
snes-06244 | U.S. Olympic medal winners have to pay taxes of up to $9,000 for each gold medal they earn. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/precious-medals/ | null | Uncategorized | null | David Mikkelson | null | U.S. Gold Medal Winners Pay Thousands in Taxes? | 1 August 2012 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00216 | Niagara Falls Illuminated In The Tricolour Is Not Fake But This Picture Is | none | https://www.boomlive.in/niagara-falls-illuminated-in-the-tricolour-is-not-fake-but-this-picture-is/ | null | null | null | null | null | Niagara Falls Illuminated In The Tricolour Is Not Fake But This Picture Is | Aug 17 2017 9:03 pm, Last Updated: Aug 19 2017 10:31 am | null | ['None'] |
snes-06438 | Killing praying mantises is illegal in (parts of) the USA. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kill-praying-mantis-illegal/ | null | Legal Affairs | null | David Mikkelson | null | Is Killing a Praying Mantis Illegal? | 31 October 1999 | null | ['United_States'] |
vogo-00461 | Statement: “Another example of unintended, and somewhat ridiculous, consequences in PPACA (the health care reform act) can be found in a provision that requires individuals to obtain a doctor’s prescription before using their own money to purchase over-the-counter medications like aspirin or NyQuil,” U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., wrote in an op-ed published by the Union-Tribune on Dec. 17. | determination: false | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/fact-check-doctor-approval-needed-for-nyquil/ | Analysis: Part of the landmark health care legislation passed by Congress last year changed how millions of people can receive discounted medical supplies. In the editorial, Bilbray derided the change as another example of failed legislation and advocated for an overhaul. | null | null | null | null | Fact Check: Doctor Approval Needed for NyQuil? | January 5, 2011 | null | ['United_States', 'Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act', 'U-T_San_Diego', 'Darrell_Issa'] |
vogo-00304 | Fact Check TV: Chargers and Struggling Schools | none | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/fact/fact-check-tv-chargers-and-struggling-schools/ | null | null | null | null | null | Fact Check TV: Chargers and Struggling Schools | December 5, 2011 | null | ['None'] |
farg-00277 | Claims President Obama "founded ISIS" and "the co-founder" was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. | false | https://www.factcheck.org/2016/08/trumps-false-obama-isis-link/ | null | the-factcheck-wire | Donald Trump | Lori Robertson | ['Presidential Election 2016', 'Iraq war'] | Trump’s False Obama-ISIS Link | August 11, 2016 | [' At a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Florida – Wednesday, August 10, 2016 '] | ['Barack_Obama', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton'] |
goop-00994 | Ed Skrein Is Angelina Jolie’s “Boyfriend,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/ed-skrein-angelina-jolie-boyfriend-dating-fake-news/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Ed Skrein Is NOT Angelina Jolie’s “Boyfriend,” Despite Claim | 8:59 pm, May 15, 2018 | null | ['Boyfriend'] |
snes-02552 | Instagram model Kristyna Martelli underwent 100 elective cosmetic medical procedures, and died during a surgery in April 2017. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kristyna-martelli/ | null | Entertainment | null | Bethania Palma | null | Did Instagram Model Kristyna Martelli Die in Surgery? | 24 April 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09249 | Scott Maddox has run "losing campaigns for 3 of Florida's 4 available cabinet positions." | false | /florida/statements/2010/may/06/adam-putnam/adam-putnam-places-perennial-loser-tag-agriculture/ | Democrat Scott Maddox is using the oil spill growing in the Gulf of Mexico as an opportunity to distinguish himself in a down-ballot race for agriculture commissioner. Maddox, the former mayor of Tallahassee, has prodded U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, the Republican frontrunner, to rule out the possibility of increased oil drilling in the gulf. Putnam has been a proponent of drilling in the past, and even proposing Congress allow new oil wells within 50 miles of Florida. On May 4, 2010, came word that Maddox's Tallahassee law firm was suing British Petroleum for its role in the spill. News of the suit prompted a searing response from Putnam campaign manager Trey McCarley. "When in doubt, sue," McCarley said. "As a result of his multiple losing campaigns for 3 of Florida’s 4 available Cabinet positions, Scott Maddox has confused job descriptions for the one he’s running for this time. While oil continues to pour out of the earth at a rate of 210,000 gallons per day, Scott Maddox runs to the courthouse to sue someone, anyone, in a desperate attempt to make money from misery." Sifting out the rhetoric, we wondered if Maddox, 42, had already lost campaigns for three Florida Cabinet posts. First about the Florida Cabinet. Though Putnam's campaign said the Cabinet has four positions, it technically only has three -- chief financial officer, attorney general and agriculture commissioner. The three-person Cabinet meets with the governor and acts as the state clemency board, and oversees several other state functions. In his claim, Putnam is wrongly counting the governor as a member of the Cabinet (though it's an easy mistake). Until 2003, the Cabinet had six members plus the governor. Along with the attorney general and agriculture commissioner, Cabinet members included the secretary of state and the commissioner of education, positions that were once elected, but now appointed, and the positions of treasurer and comptroller, which merged to become CFO. Now about Maddox. He was still in law school at Florida State University in 1993, when at the age of 24, he was elected to the Tallahassee City Commission. In 1995, city commissioners elected him mayor (the commission made the decision in Tallahassee then). In 1997, Maddox was elected mayor by voters after a change of government structure. Ran for attorney general -- lost. Maddox flirted with running for governor in 2002, but instead decided to run for attorney general. He finished second in a four-way Democratic primary behind Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer. Dyer went on to lose to then-Republican Charlie Crist. That's one losing campaign. Maddox continued to serve as Tallahassee's mayor until 2003, when he was elected chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. He served as the state party chairman until March 2005. Ran for governor -- dropped out. He left that job and announced he was running for governor in 2006. "I know the potential of this great state," Maddox said in announcing his candidacy on May 16, 2005. "And as someone who served nearly 10 years as mayor of Tallahassee, I am the only candidate with the executive experience necessary to both offer a vision for Florida's future, and make that vision a reality for everyday Floridians." Maddox's announcement may have been the high-water mark of his campaign for the state's top elected office. Within days of announcing his candidacy, the St. Petersburg Times reported that Maddox -- while party chairman --- had quietly been paid to help win support for a controversial development proposal reviled by Leon County Democrats. A few weeks later, the Internal Revenue Service froze the party's bank account because it failed to pay about $200,000 in payroll and Social Security taxes while Maddox was chairman. Later came news that while he chaired the Leon County party in 2004, it paid a $10,500 fine for campaign finance violations but never reported it as required. Maddox blamed the problems on a bookkeeper and longtime friend who admitted she had made a series of major mistakes and kept them hidden from her bosses. An internal investigation questioned Maddox's hiring decisions at the party, and his campaign faced two pending complaints of alleged campaign finance violations with the Florida Elections Commission, the Times reported. He dropped out of the race on Oct. 7, 2005, about 11 months before the Democratic primary. Maddox endorsed U.S. Rep. Jim Davis of Tampa, who won the party's nomination but went on to lose that November to then-Republican Charlie Crist. That's two losing campaigns (if you give Putnam the benefit of the doubt that dropping out before a vote is cast is the same as losing and if you let slide the fact that the governor isn't technically in the Florida Cabinet). We checked the state Division of Elections to see if Maddox ran for a Cabinet position or governor and lost a third time, but came up empty. Running for agriculture commissioner? McCarley, Putnam's campaign manager, said the third race is Maddox's 2010 bid for agriculture commissioner. "The three out of four I was referring to (were) attorney general, governor and the current one, which is why we referred to it as 'losing' instead of lost," McCarley said. McCarley's right in that he did say losing. But we don't buy his argument. We found no independent, public polling data saying Putnam is beating Maddox in a hypothetical November match-up. Moreover, we wouldn't even consider that evidence Maddox is losing (See Charlie Crist Senate poll numbers circa June 2009 as evidence). Plus the context of the quote strongly suggests that Maddox's bid for agriculture commissioner is his fourth run at a Cabinet-level post. In trying to cast Maddox as a politician who will run for anything he think he might win, the Putnam campaign said Maddox has run "losing campaigns for 3 of Florida's 4 available Cabinet positions." The minor offense in this case is counting Maddox's run for governor as a run for Cabinet. The governor isn't a member of the Cabinet, according to the state Constitution. But that's not what has us worried. Putnam errs in counting Maddox's 2010 bid for agriculture commissioner as a losing campaign. Maddox lost a campaign for attorney general and pulled out of a run for governor. The third race is still up in the air. We rate Putnam's claim False. | null | Adam Putnam | null | null | null | 2010-05-06T16:41:38 | 2010-05-04 | ['None'] |
tron-01205 | California City Goes Broke Because it is a Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens | unproven! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/maywood-california-broke/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | California City Goes Broke Because it is a Sanctuary for Illegal Aliens | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09939 | Says he didn't call Dr. George Tiller a baby killer, as liberal groups charge, but was merely reporting what "some prolifers branded him." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jun/05/bill-oreilly/bill-oreilly-called-george-tiller-baby-killer/ | Liberals are criticizing conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly for his harsh comments about Dr. George Tiller, who was shot to death while attending church on May 31, 2009, in Wichita, Kan. Their argument is that O'Reilly repeatedly named Tiller as a late-term abortion provider and called him a "baby killer." That publicity contributed to Tiller's death, they say. Antiabortion activist Scott Roeder, 51, has been charged with Tiller's murder. To be clear, we haven't found anyone saying that Roeder watched O'Reilly's show or was influenced by him directly. And we aren't attempting to check any claims or suggestions that O'Reilly's words incited violence. O'Reilly responded to his critics in an opinion article posted on BillOReilly.com and in the conservative journal Human Events . He began by saying that Tiller "did not deserve his fate" and was "an American citizen entitled to protection." "No matter what you think about abortion, it is a sad day for the country when vigilantism takes a life," O'Reilly wrote. O'Reilly said that liberal groups were targeting him unfairly. "Even though I reported on the doctor honestly, the loons asserted that my analysis of him was 'hateful,'" O'Reilly wrote. "Chief of among the complaints was the doctor's nickname, 'Tiller the baby killer.' Some prolifers branded him with that, and I reported it. So did hundreds of other news sources." O'Reilly went on to criticize media outlets for glorifying Tiller in order to silence those who oppose abortion, especially late-term abortion. We wanted to see what O'Reilly had said about Tiller, to see if O'Reilly was indeed being criticized for his reporting on other groups' characterization of Tiller as he said. We searched transcripts of The O'Reilly Factor , his show that appears on the Fox News Channel. We found at least 42 instances of O'Reilly mentioning Tiller by name, going back to 2005. In 24 instances, we found that O'Reilly referred to Tiller specifically as a "baby killer." Most of the time, O'Reilly would simply refer to the Tiller as "Tiller the baby killer" or as "Dr. George Tiller, known as Tiller the baby killer" without attributing it to anyone. We found four times when O'Reilly said that "some" called him Tiller the baby killer. We did not find any instance where O'Reilly named an individual or a particular antiabortion group that referred to Tiller that way. Here is how O'Reilly has discussed Tiller in 2009, prior to Tiller's death: • May 15: O'Reilly discussed President Barack Obama's commencement speech at Notre Dame University, saying he was troubled that a Catholic school would allow Obama to speak. "Barack Obama throughout his political career has enabled abortion. There's no doubt that he has. All right? He has recently appointed Gov. (Kathleen) Sebelius to (Secretary of) Health and Human Services. Gov. Sebelius is the most proabortion governor in the United States. Based upon Dr. Tiller, the baby killer in her state and all of that, all right." • May 11: O'Reilly wondered whom Obama would nominate to the Supreme Court, saying that he thought Obama was "callous" when it came to abortion. "I mean, the guy puts Sebelius in as the health — you can't get a more fanatically — and that woman is proabortion," O'Reilly said. "She wants the babies done for. She supported Tiller the Baby Killer out there. So, enough with her." • April 27: O'Reilly discussed Sebelius' nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services. O'Reilly said that Sebelius "recently vetoed a bill that placed restrictions on late-term abortions in Kansas. The bill was introduced because of the notorious Tiller the Baby Killer case, where Dr. George Tiller destroys fetuses for just about any reason right up until the birth date for $5,000. There's no question Ms. Sebelius is one of the most proabortion politicians in America." • March 27: Tiller was charged with misdemeanor offenses for violating Kansas law on late-term abortions. Tiller was acquitted. O'Reilly said, "Now, we have bad news to report that Tiller the baby killer out in Kansas, acquitted. Acquitted today of murdering babies. I wasn't in the courtroom. I didn't sit on the jury. But this, there's got to be a special place in hell for this guy." • March 26: O'Reilly talked about the ongoing trial: "Another revolting situation is Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, known as Tiller the Baby Killer, who's on trial for killing babies who are about to be born, late-term abortions." O'Reilly also said, "If you want to kill a baby, you hire Tiller, you've got to pay him 5,000 up front, and he'll kill the baby. ... You should know, his best friend is the governor of Kansas, Sebelius. ... She has taken specific steps to carve out the law so that it will protect Tiller the baby killer." • March 17: Still on the Tiller trial, O'Reilly said, "You know this George Tiller, called Tiller the baby killer, is charged with 19 misdemeanors. And what this guy does, and we have proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, Kelly, is that he kills babies in late term. He aborts them in late term. They're no longer fetuses. They're viable babies. He aborts them for any and all reasons if you pay him $5,000." • March 2: O'Reilly said Sebelius took "campaign money from George Tiller, known as Tiller, the baby killer. He's currently charged with a variety of crimes centering on his abortion practice. He aborts babies at any time for just about any reason if you pay him $5,000." • Jan. 26: O'Reilly discussed an executive order Obama signed allowing federal money to go to international family planning groups that provide abortions. O'Reilly complained that Obama quietly signed the order rather than publicizing it. "I wanted George Tiller the baby killer going, 'Yeah, can I make more money killing babies now,'" O'Reilly said. That's just from 2009. There were many other examples in previous years. These instances and others we reviewed clearly show that O'Reilly was not reporting the views of others, but was expressing his own views on the doctor. O'Reilly said in his column that "Some prolifers branded" Tiller a baby killer, "and I reported it," as if he were reporting the views of others. But the transcripts show O'Reilly repeatedly referred to Tiller as a baby killer without attribution. So we find his statement that liberal groups are targeting him for his reporting of what others said to be False. | null | Bill O'Reilly | null | null | null | 2009-06-05T15:45:22 | 2009-06-03 | ['None'] |
snes-02007 | A July 2017 Facebook post shows Tom Hanks wearing a t-shirt bearing a number of liberal slogans. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-hanks-t-shirt/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Tom Hanks Wears Political T-Shirt? | 26 July 2017 | null | ['Tom_Hanks'] |
pose-01285 | We will move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem. | promise kept | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/trumpometer/promise/1377/move-us-embassy-tel-aviv-jerusalem/ | null | trumpometer | Donald Trump | null | null | Move U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem | 2017-01-17T09:10:29 | null | ['United_States', 'Jerusalem', 'Jews'] |
bove-00132 | Indian News Outlets Run Istanbul Hailstones Video As Cyclone Ockhi In Mumbai | none | https://www.boomlive.in/indian-news-outlets-run-istanbul-hailstones-video-as-cyclone-ockhi-in-mumbai/ | null | null | null | null | null | Indian News Outlets Run Istanbul Hailstones Video As Cyclone Ockhi In Mumbai | Dec 05 2017 3:17 pm, Last Updated: Dec 15 2017 2:42 pm | null | ['Mumbai'] |
pomt-01170 | On timing of right to work legislation | half flip | /wisconsin/statements/2014/dec/10/robin-vos/did-robin-vos-change-his-tune-timing-right-work-de/ | As they sought re-election in 2014, Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislative leaders downplayed their interest in blocking private-sector unions from requiring workers to become members when hired at unionized shops. But as 2014 winds down, a sudden push for quick consideration of so-called "right to work" legislation is attracting much attention at the Capitol. The turn of events drew scorn from Democratic legislative leaders and labor officials but was cheered by some conservatives. "Reversal: WI Republicans to push right-to-work legislation after all": That was the headline over conservative blogger Ed Morrissey’s commentary in a Dec. 4, 2014 posting. This is a good opportunity to put the Flip-O-Meter to use. We’ll focus on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a longstanding and high-profile backer of right-to-work -- specifically on his stance on when Wisconsin should debate the issue and when it might take effect. In short, on the urgency of the issue. As usual, we offer our disclaimer. The Flip-O-Meter does not rate the rightness or wrongness of a position, of even the merits of changing it. It is simply a measure of whether someone has changed positions or made inconsistent statements. Right to work A state is considered a "right-to-work" state if it prohibits unions from negotiating contracts with employers that provide for a "union shop." A union shop is a workplace in which all employees are required to pay union dues. On the flip side, a state that allows union shops is considered by unions to be a "free-bargaining" state. The National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation says the 24 states that have passed Right to Work laws are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas,Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming. Unions say right to work laws break people’s bargaining power and lead to reduced wages and benefits. Proponents of such laws, including Vos, have cited higher rates of income growth and employment in right-to-work states. We have summarized the evidence this way in various fact checks: There is some evidence of economic advantage in right to work states. But evidence is lacking that right to work, rather than other factors, is the cause. Let’s look at what Vos has said in recent years, since Republicans won control of the three branches of government, about taking it up. December 2010: After Walker’s election, Vos said he might propose rewriting state law so Wisconsin workers could no longer be required to pay union dues to hold a job. At the time, he was the incoming Finance Committee co-chairman. "From my perspective, I think that if you look at all of the data that has been collected, states that have non-forced, compulsory union membership when you want to work somewhere have higher rates of income growth, have higher rates of manufacturing -- actually, over time, have seen much greater increases in their standard of living," Vos said at the time on WISN’s "Upfront with Mike Gousha." A few months after Vos spoke, Walker introduced Act 10, which focused only on public-sector unions. It all but eliminated collective bargaining for most public employees. Act 10 also prohibited the automatic deduction of union dues from government workers’ checks. Amid the controversy over Act 10, Vos did not pursue a similar measure for private-sector unions. May 2012: During the Walker recall race, Vos said he supported right to work but "I am not going to pursue that any time in the foreseeable future, and I am confident that Gov. Walker is not either." He spoke after a video surfaced in which Walker told a billionaire backer of his that he planned to "divide and conquer" unions starting with public-sector ones. January 2013: A month after Michigan outlawed forced union membership, Vos pledged that no private-sector right-to-work bill would be voted on in the legislative session starting January 2013 and ending January 2015. He kept that promise. April 2013: When conservative talk show host Jerry Bader asked if right to work would be on the agenda if Walker is re-elected in 2014, Vos said it could be four or more years away. "It's going to take a long while for us to really see the impact of what it will take to turn Wisconsin around." July 2014: After Act 10 was upheld in the state Supreme Court, Vos said he remained a backer of right to work, but he "does not think this is the time to try it in Wisconsin." October 2014: Days before the Nov. 4 elections, Vos said on Wisconsin Public Radio: "It’s not on our agenda. I know the Democrats have used a lot of scare tactics to say it’s going to be brought up in the next two years. It’s not going to be." He spoke as the Assembly Republicans released a detailed written agenda for 2015. It did not mention right to work. Nov. 9, 2014: Less than a week after Republicans retained full control in Madison, Vos again appeared on Gousha’s show. He was asked if there was "any chance" right to work could happen in the next couple of years. "I definitely think we should have the discussion of whether it’s good or bad," Vos said. Vos made it clear, though, that he wanted to make a detailed case to the public and not rush to action. "The public support for right to work is not necessarily there today, and I say that once again as a supporter," Vos said. He noted the "big ruckus" ignited in Madison in 2011 when Walker introduced Act 10. Dec. 1, 2014: After news broke of a newly formed private group to promote right to work legislation in Wisconsin, Vos issued a statement: "I have long been a supporter of right to work and drafted a proposal in the past. I look forward to a healthy discussion as the case is made for the benefits of being a right to work state." Dec. 4, 2014: Republican Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate leader, jumped in and gave new urgency to the issue. Fitzgerald said right to work must be debated early in the session that begins in January 2015. Vos didn’t disagree that it should be debated during the session, but said he had no plans to take the issue up right away in January in the Assembly. For this item, we asked Vos spokeswoman Kit Beyer whether Vos had been consistent on the timetable of taking up right to work. The Journal Sentinel’s story about Fitzgerald’s comments, she noted, quoted Vos saying: "Rushing into it certainly doesn't serve any purpose." "As a supporter of right to work, he welcomes a healthy discussion on the issue, one that looks like it is just beginning," Beyer told us. Our rating There’s no dramatic change by Vos here, even on the timing of considering right to work. Even after the election, Vos seemed reluctant to let another contentious debate over unions take precedence over the rest of his agenda. But he’s no longer talking about years of waiting before legislators take up the issue, in contrast to his campaign-season rhetoric. On balance, we rate this a Half Flip. | null | Robin Vos | null | null | null | 2014-12-10T15:38:53 | 2014-12-04 | ['None'] |
pomt-09381 | Did not vote for tax increases as a member of the West Miami City Commission. | false | /florida/statements/2010/mar/28/marco-rubio/rubio-says-he-didnt-vote-tax-increases-member-west/ | The tax-cutting bona fides of former House Speaker Marco Rubio and Gov. Charlie Crist were center stage during their first U.S. Senate primary debate. In front of a national television audience March 28, 2010, on FOX News Sunday, Crist and Rubio tried to one-up each other on their voting records and accomplishments. If you weren't watching, it went something like this: I cut taxes. You raised taxes. Nuh-uh. You raised taxes. I cut taxes. You're a liar. Well, you're a bigger liar, you tax raiser. Crist told Fox's Chris Wallace that he signed the largest tax cut in the state's history, (a claim we twice have rated False) while Rubio proposed the largest tax increase ever in Florida (a claim we plan to rate soon). Rubio claimed that Crist broke a no new taxes pledge (he signed a 2009 budget with $2.2 billion in increased fees) while Rubio kept the same pledge (a claim we also rated False). Rubio also said Crist is distorting Rubio's tax record. That prompted a comeback from Florida's sitting governor. "Just let me say that (Rubio) voted for tax increases when he was on the West Miami City Commission, and he said on his Web site that he has never voted for a new tax," Crist said. "That's just not the truth, and he ought to be truthful to the people of Florida before he asks for their vote." Rubio responded flatly: "Chris, that's also inaccurate." Because both candidates seem hung up on if either ever supported a tax increase, we wanted to examine Rubio's time as a West Miami City commissioner. Before he was elected to the state House, Rubio was a member of the West Miami City Commission from 1998-2000. Records show that in 1998 and 1999, he voted to increase the city's property tax collections. Understanding the process can be a little tricky. Cities and counties across Florida set a property tax rate. That rate, which essentially is a percentage, is then mulitplied by the value of a person's property. The result of the calculation is a person's property tax bill. West Miami didn't raise its property tax rate in either 1998 or 1999, but because property values increased (the other half of the calculation). West Miami took in more money in 1998 and 1999, and West Miami residents paid more in property taxes. West Miami published a "notice of proposed tax increase" in 1998 and 1999, according to the Palm Beach Post, and state law requires city leaders to announce the tax rate as a tax increase. PolitiFact Florida tracked down the final budget resolutions for both years. They show that the city of West Miami, without raising tax rates, was increasing property taxes -- 1.402 percent in 1998 and 5.545 percent in 1999. The roll call has then-Commissioner Rubio as voting "Y" both years. A Rubio spokesman, Alberto Martinez, told the Post that Rubio did not vote for tax increases because the tax rate did not change. It's an ironic argument because Rubio argued as a member of the Legislature that local governments were raising taxes while being able to claim they were keeping the tax rate the same. "One of the reasons the system is broken is because with the massive escalation of valuations, local governments have been able to brag about cutting your millage, yet you are still paying more in property taxes," Rubio wrote in a 2007 letter to supporters. That's what happened in West Miami. Responding to a claim from Crist, Rubio said it was "inaccurate" to say he voted to raise taxes while a member of the West Miami City Commission. But Crist got it right, records show. We rate Rubio's statement False. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/6bb3a85b-4a9b-4edf-8d5d-91984241c709 | null | Marco Rubio | null | null | null | 2010-03-28T14:43:05 | 2010-03-28 | ['None'] |
tron-01156 | Obama’s 32 Month Report Card | truth! & fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-report-card/ | null | crime-police | null | null | null | Obama’s 32 Month Report Card | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02045 | Nicole Kidman, Justin Theroux “Hiding” Chemistry From Keith Urban, Jennifer Aniston? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-justin-theroux-hiding-keith-urban-jennifer-aniston/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Nicole Kidman, Justin Theroux “Hiding” Chemistry From Keith Urban, Jennifer Aniston? | 1:16 pm, December 12, 2017 | null | ['Nicole_Kidman', 'Keith_Urban'] |
goop-00801 | Robert Pattinson, Rihanna Going On “Secret Dates”? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/robert-pattinson-rihanna-dating/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Robert Pattinson, Rihanna Going On “Secret Dates”? | 12:47 pm, June 18, 2018 | null | ['Robert_Pattinson'] |
snes-02669 | 3 Liberal Celebrities Arrested for Conspiracy to Assassinate President Trump? | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/liberal-celebrities-assassination-plot/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Were Three Liberal Celebrities Arrested for a Conspiracy to Assassinate President Trump? | 6 April 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00023 | Miley Cyrus, Liam Hemsworth Secretly Married In Georgia? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/miley-cyrus-liam-hemsworth-secretly-married-georgia/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Miley Cyrus, Liam Hemsworth Secretly Married In Georgia? | 1:07 pm, November 8, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
farg-00243 | Claims he won "the Electoral College in a landslide." | false | https://www.factcheck.org/2016/12/groundhog-friday-17/ | null | the-factcheck-wire | Donald Trump | Eugene Kiely | ['Groundhog Friday', 'Illegal immigration'] | Groundhog Friday | December 23, 2016 | [' In a tweet – Sunday, November 27, 2016 '] | ['None'] |
hoer-00885 | Internet Rumour: Ramsgate Abduction Attempts - Man With Grey Hair & Glasses Driving a Red Car | unsubstantiated messages | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/ramsgate-abduction-attempts-warning.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Internet Rumour: Ramsgate Abduction Attempts - Man With Grey Hair & Glasses Driving a Red Car | 24th March 2011 | null | ['None'] |
snes-05653 | Kroger is giving away free grocery coupons or gift cards to Facebook users who like and share a post. | scam | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kroger-giftcard-coupon-scam/ | null | Fraud & Scams | null | David Mikkelson | null | Kroger Free Coupon/Gift Card Scam | 15 October 2014 | null | ['Kroger', 'Facebook'] |
vees-00338 | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Timeline of landmark ASEAN document on migrant workers | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-sheet-timeline-landmark-asean-document-migra | null | null | null | null | ASEAN50 | VERA FILES FACT SHEET: Timeline of landmark ASEAN document on migrant workers | November 14, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01441 | Jennifer Aniston Did Offer Justin Theroux Cash To Keep “Dark Secrets” Quiet, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-justin-theroux-cash-hush-money-secrets-tell-all-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jennifer Aniston Did NOT Offer Justin Theroux Cash To Keep “Dark Secrets” Quiet, Despite Report | 11:39 am, March 6, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
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