http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/ en-us Copyright 2008 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:00:00 -0400 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.36 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss "Everybody says they're against the special interests, but I'm the only one the special interests don't give any money to." --John McCain, Town Hall meeting, New London, NH, Nov. 18, 2007. With all the excitement surrounding the Democratic campaign, I have not been paying enough attention to John McCain and the Republicans. McCain has boasted that he is the only candidate who does not receive money from "special interests." You can listen to a video clip above on YouTube. He repeated much the same line in other town hall meetings in December and January. (I heard him say something similar myself shortly before the New Hampshire primary.) ) http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/pinocchios_for_john_mccain.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2008/02/pinocchios_for_john_mccain.html Candidate Watch Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:00:00 -0400 Father and son, 1965, Harvey Croze/Cranbrook Archives. "They [George Romney and Martin Luther King] were hand in hand...They led the march. We all swung our hands, and they held their hands up above everybody else's." Quote distributed by the Mitt Romney campaign from Shirley Basore, 72, describing a June 1963 civil rights march through Grosse Pointe, MI. After news reports challenged Mitt Romney's repeated accounts of his father marching with Martin Luther King, his campaign put a reporter from Politico in touch with eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the former Michigan governor "hand in hand" with the civil rights leader. But their memories are almost certainly flawed as contemporaneous news reports show that King was addressing a meeting in New Jersey at the time the eyewitnesses supposedly saw him in Grosse Pointe, MI. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/four_pinocchios_for_romney_on_1.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/four_pinocchios_for_romney_on_1.html Candidate Watch Sun, 23 Dec 2007 12:45:47 -0400 Three Republican candidates have denounced the "NAFTA superhighway". "They don't talk about it [the NAFTA superhighway], and they might not admit it, but there's been money spent on it. There was legislation passed in the Texas legislature unanimously to put a halt on it. They're planning on millions of acres taken by eminent domain for an international highway from Mexico to Canada, which is going to make the immigration problem that much worse." --Ron Paul, Republican CNN-YouTube Debate, November 28, 2007. Three of the eight Republican presidential candidates have co-sponsored a House of Representatives resolution denouncing a "NAFTA superhighway" that is supposedly a key part of a master plan to create a "North American Union." A fourth candidate, Mitt Romney, has said he has no evidence that such a plan exists but has pledged, just in case, to put a stop to it "if I am president." So what http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/a_superhighway_to_nowhere.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/12/a_superhighway_to_nowhere.html Candidate Watch Mon, 03 Dec 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Ron Paul in his Concord, NH, headquarters. "I lean toward a flat tax. But I want to make it real flat, like zero." --Ron Paul, Jay Leno show, October 31, 2007. "Could America exist without an income tax? The idea seems radical, yet in truth America did just fine without a federal income tax for the first 126 years of her history." --Ron Paul website. Responding to pleas by Ron Paul supporters to take their man seriously, I devoted a post last week to his plan to abolish the federal income tax, which provides Uncle Sam with $1.2 trillion in annual revenue. Paul's policy director, Joseph Becker, said he would get back to me with pie charts and other data, demonstrating how a President Paul would achieve this seemingly miraculous feat. I have now received the Paul Campaign response, which I am posting in full below, so that readers http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/four_pinocchios_for_ron_paul.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/four_pinocchios_for_ron_paul.html Candidate Watch Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Bill Richardson on the campaign trail. "I like to compete with other governors about which is the clean energy state. We are the only state that follows the Kyoto treaty." --Bill Richardson, on the Stephanie Miller radio show, November 7, 2007. The governor of New Mexico has a good record on environmental issues. But is he correct in claiming that his state is cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the 1997 Kyoto protocol that the Bush administration has refused to ratify. And is New Mexico "the only state" that is "following" the Kyoto treaty? That seems quite a stretch. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/richardson_i_am_the_greenest_o.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/richardson_i_am_the_greenest_o.html Candidate Watch Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:00:00 -0400 On the campaign trail in New Hampshire. "I made my decision about what to do about prostate cancer in 2000....The statistics, as of the time I made the decision, are absolutely accurate and I stand by them....I said, 82 percent chance of survival in the United States in 2000, 44 percent chance of survival in England. [Actually] it's a 43 percent chance of survival in England back in 2000." --Rudy Giuliani, on November 2, defending his disputed claim that his chances of surviving prostate cancer were almost twice as high in the U.S. as in England, "under socialized medicine." The former New York mayor would have us believe that he was off by one percentage point at most in calculating his chances of surviving prostate cancer in Britain. In fact, he was wrong the first time, and he is equally wrong the second time. Epidemiologists say that his claim http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/four_pinocchios_for_rudy_the_r.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/four_pinocchios_for_rudy_the_r.html Candidate Watch Wed, 07 Nov 2007 06:00:00 -0400 Obama salutes the flag "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? " --Chain e-mail attacking Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. To all the other hazards of presidential campaigning in the Internet age--the blogosphere, the 24-hour news cycle, attack ads on You Tube--add one more, the anonymous viral e-mail. By now, millions of Americans have received an e-mailed photographs of Obama in a relaxed pose standing next to his fellow candidates, Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton, with their hands firmly over their hearts as they listen to the national anthem. Several readers have asked us to investigate the provenance of this photograph, and we are happy to oblige. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/obama_nabbed_by_the_patriotic.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/11/obama_nabbed_by_the_patriotic.html Web Watch Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:00:00 -0400 "I had prostate cancer, five, six years ago. My chances of surviving prostate cancer and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine." --Rudy Giuliani, New Hampshire radio advertisement, October 29, 2007. The former New York mayor has had personal experience battling prostate cancer, but he's confused about the stats, according to several experts we consulted. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/10/rudy_miscalculates_cancer_surv.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/10/rudy_miscalculates_cancer_surv.html Candidate Watch Tue, 30 Oct 2007 07:00:00 -0400 "The idea that we can keep incarcerating and keep incarcerating -- pretty soon we're not going to have a young African-American male population in America. They're all going to be in prison or dead. One of the two."--John Edwards, MTV political forum, September 27, 2007 [Watch the Video] "We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America." --Barack Obama, NAACP forum, July 12, 2007. The Facts Where do they get this stuff? Both candidates are way off the mark. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/10/young_black_males_headed_for_e_1.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/10/young_black_males_headed_for_e_1.html Candidate Watch Wed, 03 Oct 2007 06:00:00 -0400 "It has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt that if you rub a copy of Washington Post Express on a rash, the skin ailment immediately and unconditionally clears." -- Anonymous Wikipedia entry. The Facts Thanks to an ingenious new tool designed by a Caltech graduate student, Virgil Griffith, it is now possible to figure out who has been rewriting Wikipedia entries to promote their ideological or commercial interests, or simply for personal amusement. Griffith's Wikiscanner tool allows readers to match changes in Wikipedia to the IP addresses of companies, political parties, and media organizations. Readers of the internet magazine WIRED have been voting on the "most shameful Wikipedia spinjobs." Here are some of the Factchecker's personal favorites. Readers are invited to submit their own. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/newspaper_cures_skin_rash_1.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/newspaper_cures_skin_rash_1.html Web Watch Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:00:20 -0400 "If you look back over our history, it will not take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world." -- Fred Thompson, stump speech in Iowa, September 6, 2007. The Facts A grandiose claim that is hard to justify no matter how you define "other people's liberty." Let's begin by looking at American casualties in foreign wars. (Domestic conflicts such as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War are excluded.) ConflictAmerican Deaths Spanish American War2,446 World War I116,516 World War II405,399 Korean War36,574 Vietnam58,209 Persian Gulf War382 Iraq War and Afghanistan (until 9/18/2007)4,217 TOTAL623,288 SOURCES: Congressional Research Service, DoD, DoD Historical table While heavy, U.S. military casualties are still relatively low in comparison to the military casualties of its World War II and World War I allies. In World War http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/thompsons_wars.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/thompsons_wars.html Candidate Watch Wed, 19 Sep 2007 06:30:57 -0400 "In the Vietnam War, the leaders of the White House claimed at the time that it was a necessary and crucial war, and during it, Rumsfeld and his aides murdered two million villagers. And when Kennedy took over the presidency and deviated from the general line of policy drawn up for the White House and wanted to stop this unjust war, that angered the owners of the major corporations who were benefiting from its continuation. And so Kennedy was killed." -- Osama bin Laden, video, September 2007 The Facts Donald Rumsfeld has been accused of many things, but this may be the first time that he has been accused of murdering "two million villagers" during the Vietnam War, albeit with the assistance of unnamed "aides." The most cursory look at the former defense secretary's biography is sufficient to demonstrate the ludicrousness of the claim. After serving in the U.S. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/bin_laden_rumsfeld_responsible.html http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/2007/09/bin_laden_rumsfeld_responsible.html Video Watch Wed, 19 Sep 2007 06:00:24 -0400