http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/ en-us Copyright 2008 Wed, 07 May 2008 10:30:00 -0400 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.36 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Clinton rally, Indianapolis, Ind., May 6, 2008. "Tonight we've come from behind, we've broken the tie, and thanks to you it's full speed on to the White House." --Hillary Clinton, May 6, 2008. Brave, defiant words from Hillary Clinton. But observe the facial expressions. For many people watching television on Tuesday night, the most striking impression from the Clinton victory rally in Indiana was not the words that came out of Hillary's mouth, but the look on Bill's face. It was the look of a man who knows that a dream is slipping away. The Facts Try this experiment. Take a look at this extract from Clinton's speech in Indianapolis with the volume turned down. Watch the expressions on the faces of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea, and let me know what you think. Here is what I saw. A candidate with a mask of upbeat determination on her face, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/a_geppetto_for_bill_clinton.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/a_geppetto_for_bill_clinton.html Candidate Watch Wed, 07 May 2008 10:30:00 -0400 The gasoline wars between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been heating up to coincide with the Indiana and North Carolina primaries. The airwaves are full of charges and counter-charges over Clinton's plan for a three month gas holiday between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Obama says the idea is simply an election day "gimmick"; Clinton claims her plan will save hard-working American families $8 billion a year. An examination of the fine print in the latest round of TV ads shows that both sides have been stretching the facts. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/gas_tax_wars.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/gas_tax_wars.html Candidate Watch Tue, 06 May 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Gas prices hit $4 a gallon. "Barack Obama's argument that immediately reducing gas prices won't help American commuters is shockingly naive and out of touch...Gas tax relief worked when Barack Obama voted for it in the Illinois legislature, and it would work nationally now." --Republican National Committee spokesman Alex Conant, April 28, 2008. Both John McCain and Hillary Clinton have called for a "gas tax holiday" this summer to offer commuters and vacationers some release from spiraling gas prices. They have urged Congress to suspend the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day, a step that could cost the government about $10 billion in revenues. The only major candidate to oppose the idea is Barack Obama, who voted for a similar measure in Illinois eight years ago. Obama now says that consumers will derive little benefit from the tax moratorium. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/a_holiday_from_gas_prices.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/a_holiday_from_gas_prices.html Candidate Watch Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Elton John fundraiser, April 9, 2008. "Peter Daou, Hillary Clinton's internet director, confirms that, by midnight last night, the campaign had received more than $10 million in web-based contributions [since the Pennsylvania primary]. Not pledges. Not promises. But $10 million transferred directly from the credit and debit cards of about 100,000 donors. --Mark Ambinder blog, April 23, 2008. A spat has broken out in the blogosphere over whether the Clinton campaign's claims to have raised $10 million since Tuesday are inflated. Without direct access to the Clinton fund-raising spreadsheets, it is impossible to adjudicate this dispute. But what about past claims, such as the $4 million allegedly raised by the campaign the day after Super Tuesday? http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/tracking_the_fundraisers.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/tracking_the_fundraisers.html Candidate Watch Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Philadelphia, Pa., April 23, 2008. "The Tide is Turning. After last night's decisive victory in Pennsylvania, more people have voted for Hillary than any other candidate, including Sen. Obama." --Clinton website, "The Fact Hub", April 23, 2008. Hillary Clinton got a much-needed electoral boost from the voters of Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, when she trounced Barack Obama by nearly 210,000 votes, according to the official results. It was a very clear victory, but it is a big stretch for her to claim that she is ahead in the popular vote. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/is_clinton_winning_the_popular.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/is_clinton_winning_the_popular.html Candidate Watch Thu, 24 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 State College, Pa., April 20, 2008. "I went to law school [and] borrowed money from the federal government at two percent interest. I bet there are some people here who remember that. There was a program called the National Defense Education Act. Our government invested in young people." --Hillary Clinton, Pennsylvania State University, April 20, 2008. Hillary Clinton has been painting a halcyon picture of her days as a Yale Law School student between 1969 and 1972, and how easy it was back then for students to borrow money from the federal government. She drew a collective groan from 1,500 Penn State students over the weekend when she recalled how she was able to borrow money at two percent interest to complete her law school studies. But student interest rates were not quite as low in 1969 as Clinton has claimed--and not everybody could get them. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/hillarys_two_percent_college_l.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/hillarys_two_percent_college_l.html Candidate Watch Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Hillary Clinton, April 17, 2008. "I think [the war in Iraq] is the first time we've ever been taken to war and had a president who wouldn't pay for it." --Hillary Clinton, Democratic debate in Pennsylvania, April 17, 2008. Congress invented the federal income tax in August 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. But is Hillary Clinton correct in claiming that George W. Bush is the first president in American history to refuse to pay for a war that he launched? It is a little more complicated than that. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/paying_for_the_iraq_war.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/paying_for_the_iraq_war.html Candidate Watch Fri, 18 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 9:50 p.m. Both the McCain and Clinton campaigns are accusing Obama of giving a misleading answer to Charlie Gibson about whether his handwriting was on a questionnaire that reported him as favoring a complete ban on handguns. The Obama campaign has said that a staffer "mischaracterized" the senator's views while filling up answers to the questionnaire without Obama's input. You can see the questionnaire here. Obama's handwriting is on the first page, but tonight he said flatly, "no, my writing was not on that particular questionnaire." There were, in fact, two versions of the questionnaire, filed under Obama's name in 1996 when he was running for the Illinois State Senate. One version has Obama's handwriting on it, one does not. Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor subsequently told Politico that the senator scribbled a few notes on the first page of the questionnaire, but did not read the response to the question http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/pennsylvania_democratic_debate.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/pennsylvania_democratic_debate.html Live Fact Check Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:02:37 -0400 Elton John fundraiser, April 9, 2008. "There was a lot of fulminating because Hillary, one time late at night when she was exhausted, misstated and immediately apologized for it, what happened to her in Bosnia in 1995....And I think she was the first first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt to go into a combat zone." --Bill Clinton, campaigning in Indiana, April 10, 2008. Just as the Bosnia sniper flap seemed to be dying down, count on a finger-pointing Bill Clinton to fan the embers. The former president managed to make half a dozen factual errors in coming to the defense of his wife for her now acknowledged "misstatements" about her March 1996 Bosnia trip. By Friday afternoon, the would-be first laddie was revising his revisionist version of history. He told reporters that he had received a call from Hillary telling him to "let me handle it." http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/bill_shoots_from_the_hip.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/bill_shoots_from_the_hip.html Candidate Watch Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:38:20 -0400 Molly's gas station, Manheim, Pa., March 31, 2008. "What Senator Obama does not tell you is that..he has taken roughly $213,000 from the employees of oil companies. The senator has not been upfront, open, and honest with the people of Pennsylvania with respect to this ad. He does not tell us that two of his bundlers are top executives of oil companies." --Clinton campaign conference call, April 9, 2008. The Obama and Clinton campaigns have got into a rather petty dispute over a television ad that the Illinois senator is running in Pennsylvania. The Clinton camp says that Obama has not been "upfront" about the amount of financial support that he receives from oil company employees and executives. The Clintonites have a valid point. On the other hand, they are conveniently overlooking the even larger financial contributions to their candidate from representatives of the oil and gas sector. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/the_pot_and_the_kettle.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/the_pot_and_the_kettle.html Candidate Watch Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Testifying to Congress, April 8, 2008. "We haven't turned any corners. We haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel." --Gen. David Petraeus. "The reality is, it is hard in Iraq. And there are no light switches to throw that are going to go dark to light." --Ambassador Ryan Crocker. The semi-annual Congressional dog and pony show on Iraq provided the three remaining presidential candidates an opportunity to explain how they will clean up the mess left behind by George W. Bush, beginning in January 2009. In their different ways, John McCain, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Barack Obama have all tried to convince American voters that their Iraq policy will produce peace with honor. All three candidates are spinning a very grim reality to make their preferred course of action seem easier and less painful than it actually is. Let us look at each of their positions http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/still_no_light_at_the_end_of_t.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/still_no_light_at_the_end_of_t.html Candidate Watch Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:55:00 -0400 Suffragette Jeannette Rankin "Remember, Jeannette Rankin was elected before women could vote. So who says men don't vote for a woman?" --Sen. Hillary Clinton, speech in Missoula, Montana, April 6, 2008. It is always risky for a candidate to make a historical claim without checking their facts. Hillary Clinton was wrong back in March when she insisted that no candidate, from either political party, had ever won the presidency without first winning the Ohio primary. She was earlier mistaken about the date of her own meeting with Martin Luther King Jr., saying it took place in 1963, when it actually happened in 1962. Last weekend, she made a mistake about suffragette history. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/_sufragette_jeannette_rankin_r.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/_sufragette_jeannette_rankin_r.html Candidate Watch Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Heading to Iraq, March 17, 2008 "You know, John McCain wants to continue a war in Iraq perhaps as long as 100 years." --Sen. Barack Obama, Lancaster, PA, Town Hall meeting, March 31, 2008. The charge that John McCain wants to wage a "100-year war" in Iraq has become a recurring theme of the Obama campaign. The candidate has made the claim several times on the campaign trail, as has Susan Rice, one of his top foreign policy advisers. McCain has never talked about wanting a 100-year war in Iraq. But he has talked about a prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq, similar to the stationing of U.S. troops in Germany after World War II or in Korea after the Korean war. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/mccains_100year_war.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/mccains_100year_war.html Candidate Watch Wed, 02 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Teaching at University of Chicago Law School. "Sen. Obama has often referred to himself as 'a constitutional law professor' out on the campaign trail. He never held any such title. And I think anyone, if you ask anyone in academia the distinction between a professor who has tenure and an instructor that does not...you'll get quite an emotional response." --Clinton spokesman Phil Singer. The Clinton campaign has been making a lot of the fact that some of Barack Obama's campaign literature describes the Land-of-Lincolner as a former "law professor" at the University of Chicago when in fact he was a senior lecturer. This brings to mind Henry Kissinger's famous crack about academic politics being "so vicious because the stakes are so small." It is true, as the Clinton spokesman says, that academics are very protective of their titles. But was Obama out of line when he called himself a http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/professor_obama.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/professor_obama.html Candidate Watch Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Pat Nixon, landing in Saigon, July 31, 1969. "I was the first first lady taken into a war zone since Eleanor Roosevelt." --Hillary Clinton, press conference, March 25, 2008. The Clinton campaign has cited newspaper accounts, including one in The Washington Post, to bolster her claim that her now famous March 1996 trip to Bosnia was the first visit to a "war zone" by a first lady since World War II. She is overlooking a trip to Saigon by Pat Nixon at the height of the Vietnam war as well as a trip by Barbara Bush to Saudi Arabia two months before the launching of Desert Storm. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/dont_forget_pat_nixon.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/dont_forget_pat_nixon.html Candidate Watch Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:00:00 -0400