http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/ en-us Copyright 2008 Fri, 09 May 2008 06:00:00 -0400 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.36 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Rosie O'Donnell "The government did give syphilis to black Americans for 40 years. What [Rev. Jeremiah Wright] was saying is in his history, in his genetic memory, he knows what it's like for the government to infect his own people. Because he lived through those Tuskegee experiments." --Rosie O'Donnell, May 5, NBC Today Show. Some myths are practically impossible to eradicate, particularly when they are repeated by trusted public figures. Long before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright talked about the U.S. government using the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against African-Americans, prominent commentators made equally fallacious assertions about the Tuskegee syphilis study. The list of people claiming that the government deliberately infected African-Americans with syphilis includes Wright, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings--and now Rosie O'Donnell. The Facts As outlined in a previous post , the Tuskegee study involved a group of 399 black men suffering from syphilis, who were http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/the_tuskegee_experiment_part_i.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/the_tuskegee_experiment_part_i.html MSM Watch Fri, 09 May 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Karl Rove and friend. Columbus, Ohio: You boldly predicted that Bush's approval ratings would rebound -- instead he is, according to Gallup, the most unpopular president in history. Will you finally admit that your vision for this nation has been overwhelmingly rejected by the majority of the people? Karl Rove: Get your facts right -- there are at least three president who had worse approval ratings, Truman, Johnson and Nixon. I'm absolutely positive history will be kind to this president, who made the right decisions in a difficult time for this nation. --Karl Rove online washingtonpost.com chat, May 7, 2008 Karl Rove, the much-acclaimed "architect" of George W. Bush's 2000 and 2004 election victories, claimed that a Washington Post reader got his facts wrong during an online discussion Wednesday. But the Gallup organization does indeed report that Bush's disapproval rating reached an all-time high of 69 percent in April, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/how_unpopular_is_george_bush.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/how_unpopular_is_george_bush.html Web Watch Thu, 08 May 2008 11:55:00 -0400 Coco Solo, Panama Canal Zone, 1936. "John Sidney McCain, III, is a `natural born Citizen' under Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution of the United States." --U.S. Senate Resolution, April 30, 2008. On Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate unanimously declared John S. McCain III a "natural-born citizen," eligible to be president of the United States. That was the good news for the presumptive Republican nominee, who was born nearly 72 years ago in a military hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. The bad news is that the Senate resolution is a non-binding opinion that fails to resolve one of the murkiest, untested areas of the U.S. constitution. In an attempt to clarify the issues at stake, I am posting the key documents in the debate. For a more detailed look at the constitutional debate, see my story in today's print edition of the Post, available here. As a http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/citizen_mccain.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/05/citizen_mccain.html Candidate Watch Fri, 02 May 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 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 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 McCain TV ad "624787" "What is your rank?" "Lieutenant commander in the Navy." "And your official number?" "624787." VOICE-OVER: "John McCain--the American president Americans have been waiting for." Snippets of video create powerful images, but they often leave out an important part of the story. Last week, the McCain campaign launched what it billed as "the first television ad of the general election" to kick off the senator's "Service to America" tour. The centerpiece of the ad (43 seconds in) is a brief clip of McCain being questioned in hospital in Hanoi a few weeks after his U.S. Navy plane was shot down while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam. The clip shows McCain providing his rank and service number, as authorized by the Code of Conduct for American Prisoners of War. Some news outlets depicted the clip, recycled from an earlier McCain advertisement here, as part of http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/name_rank_and_service_number.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/04/name_rank_and_service_number.html Candidate Watch Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:03:00 -0400 Barack Obama, aged 10, with his father. "What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, "You know, we're battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we're not observing the ideals set fort in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites." So the Kennedys decided we're going to do an air lift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/obamas_camelot_connection.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/obamas_camelot_connection.html Candidate Watch Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Celebrating victory in Columbus, Ohio, March 5, 2008 "No person has ever won the White House without winning the Ohio primary, in either party...Somehow the people of Ohio end up picking the winners." --Hillary Clinton, interview with Columbus, Ohio, TV station, March 4, 2008. It has become part of political mythology that you cannot win the presidency without carrying Ohio. (Actually John Kennedy pulled off this feat in 1960, winning the general election even though he lost Ohio by 273,000 votes.) But can you win the presidency without winning your party's Ohio primary? History suggests that Hillary Clinton is wrong on this point. The New York senator made the "No person has ever won the White House" claim in an interview with an Ohio TV station while waiting for the results to arrive. She qualified the claim later in the evening, in her victory speech, when she added the http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/clinton_stumbles_on_ohio_histo.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/03/clinton_stumbles_on_ohio_histo.html Candidate Watch Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:52:05 -0400 MSNBC Debate, Cleveland, Ohio, Feb. 26, 2008. Here are a few more controversies that cropped up in the Democratic debate on Tuesday night that I was unable to fact check immediately. Readers wrote in with dozens of tips and questions, which have provided more material for truth squadding. You can read the comments here. Thanks! What would FDR have done? Hillary Clinton says that her health care plan is "universal," while Obama's plan leaves out "15 million Americans." The New York senator bases her claim on the fact that her plan includes an individual mandate requiring all Americans to purchase health insurance. Obama's health care plan contains a mandate on parents to purchase health insurance for their children, but no mandate on adults. Defending her approach, Clinton said the following: "It would be as though Franklin Roosevelt said, let's make Social Security voluntary...Let's let everybody in if they can http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/readers_fact_check_dem_debate.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/readers_fact_check_dem_debate.html Candidate Watch Thu, 28 Feb 2008 06:00:00 -0400 The Clintons on the campaign trail. Bill Clinton "continues to make statements that aren't supported by the facts, whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas." --Barack Obama, ABC Good Morning America, Jan. 21, 2008. "President Clinton's statements about Sen. Obama are true." --Hillary Clinton website, The Fact Hub. Barack Obama has accused former President Bill Clinton of "violating the standards of honesty" in political discourse, and distorting the record in order to support his wife's presidential bid. The Clinton campaign has dismissed the charge as sour grapes following two straight losses for Obama in New Hampshire and Nevada. "They are frustrated and they are attacking Bill Clinton out of frustration," said Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson. Some of the issues first raised by Bill Clinton resurfaced in the Democratic debate televised by CNN on Monday night, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/bill_the_attack_dog.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/bill_the_attack_dog.html Candidate Watch Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:00:00 -0400 The poet and the pol "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose." --Hillary Clinton, Nashua, N.H., Jan. 6. I will get back to fact checking tomorrow, but first let me share my impressions from four exciting days in New Hampshire. When I heard Hillary Clinton quote Mario Cuomo in a packed sports hall in Nashua on Sunday, I knew instantly that she had captured the essence of the 2008 presidential campaign. The most important distinction in this race, at least at this stage, is not between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. It is between the Poetry Party and the Prose Party. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/poetry_versus_prose.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/poetry_versus_prose.html Candidate Watch Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:53:16 -0400 UPDATED Monday 11:30 a.m. I am at Manchester airport, on my way back to Baltimore, after a fascinating four days in the Granite State. I will file a wrapup report tomorrow. There have been lots of statements to fact check, several of which will take a little more time. Here are a couple of quick ones that caught my attention from Clinton's Town Hall meeting in Peterborough and a Mitt Romney "Ask Mitt anything" meeting in Salem. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/offbase_on_nafta_and_hillary_c.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/01/offbase_on_nafta_and_hillary_c.html Candidate Watch Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:37:05 -0400 Marching in Selma, March 4, 2007. "As a young girl, I had the great privilege of hearing Dr. King speak in Chicago. The year was 1963. My youth minister from our church took a few of us down on a cold January night to hear someone that we had read about, we had watched on television, we had seen with our own eyes from a distance, this phenomenon known as Dr. King. He titled the sermon he gave that night "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." --Hillary Clinton, March 4, 2007, on the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma. Following on the controversy about whether Mitt Romney "saw" his father "march" with Martin Luther King Jr., a reader asked me to clarify exactly when Hillary Clinton went to hear the civil rights leader speak, an important event in her teenage years. The New York senator has presented herself http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/hillary_and_martin_luther_king.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/hillary_and_martin_luther_king.html Candidate Watch Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:06:50 -0400