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A few months ago, a chain e-mail purporting to be a
line-by-line analysis
of the House health care reform bill reached in-boxes all over the country, warning people of the dire consequences of the Democratic plans for reform. Taking a page from the same playbook, the House Republican Conference has created
a similar list
for the new health care bill that will be coming to the House floor in the next few weeks.
You can read
our fact-check of the Republican analysis
in its entirety. Here, we're looking only at the statement, "Page 111 - Section 223 establishes a new board of federal bureaucrats (the 'Health Benefits Advisory Committee') to dictate the health plans that all individuals must purchase."
Under the Democrats' health care reform plan, people will have to buy health insurance or pay a tax penalty, and policymakers have said they want everyone covered. The House bill also says what basic coverage should include: hospitalizations, physicians' visits, prescription drugs, mental health and substance abuse treatment, preventive care, maternity care, well-baby and well-child care, and durable medical equipment.
But it doesn't provide specifics, like what kinds of prescription drugs or specific medical procedures must be covered.
The bill creates the Health Benefits Advisory Committee to advise the secretary of Health and Human Services on what the specifics should be. The committee will have up to 27 members appointed by the president and the Comptroller General, and it will represent the major stakeholders in the health care system, according to the bill.
The committee doesn't dictate health plans, though: It advises the secretary, who can reject the recommendations. Another important caveat is that the committee helps set a baseline for different types of coverage.
People are then free to select any health plan they like that meets or exceeds the basic requirements. So the committee does not dictate which health plans all individuals must purchase.
We find the House Republican Conference's statement, "Page 111 - Section 223 establishes a new board of federal bureaucrats (the 'Health Benefits Advisory Committee') to dictate the health plans that all individuals must purchase," makes it sound as if bureaucrats tell you which plan you have to buy. In reality, the committee advises the secretary of Health and Human Services on what baseline coverage should include. We rate the statement False.
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A few months ago, a chain e-mail purporting to be a
line-by-line analysis
of the House health care reform bill reached in-boxes all over the country, warning people of the dire consequences of the Democratic plans for reform. Taking a page from the same playbook, the House Republican Conference has created
a similar list
for the new health care bill that will be coming to the House floor in the next few weeks.
You can read
our fact-check of the Republican analysis
in its entirety. Here, we're looking only at the statement, "Page 110 - Section 222(e) requires the use of federal dollars to fund abortions through the government-run health plan."
We should emphasize that the House bill has yet to be voted on, and Democratic leaders have said they might consider new language on how the bill handles abortion. The Senate is expected to consider its own bill with details that diverge somewhat from the House.
The latest version of the House bill incorporates an amendment proposed by Rep. Lois Capps, a Democrat from California. Her proposal sought to create a compromise on abortion, especially in regards to the public option, a basic insurance plan run by the government and offered as a choice on the health insurance exchange.
The public option could offer abortion services, but if it does, those services would be paid for with segregated patient premiums, not public subsidies. We looked at
the Capps amendment
is some detail previously. We concluded that the Capps amendment would stop tax dollars from subsidizing abortion.
The sticking point in the new Republican claim, though, is the term "federal dollars."
If you consider federal dollars to be tax revenues, then the public option would not pay for abortion, because patient premiums will pay for abortion.
On the other hand, if you consider "federal dollars" to be any money handled by a federal agency, then the public option would pay for abortion.
We've concluded before that if millions of uninsured people would now get insurance due to the health care plan, and some of the plans offer abortion coverage, we think it's fair to conclude that means more women would have access to abortion services. Our previous coverage has more detail on
abortion and health care reform
, and how it has been handled in the Senate.
The House Republican Conference said that health reform "requires the use of federal dollars to fund abortions through the government-run health plan." We find this depends on how a person defines the somewhat vague term "federal dollars." We rate the statement Half True.
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A few months ago, a chain e-mail purporting to be a
line-by-line analysis
of the House health care reform bill reached in-boxes all over the country, warning people of the dire consequences of the Democratic plans for reform. Taking a page from the same playbook, the House Republican Conference has created
a similar list
for the new health care bill that will be coming to the House floor in the next few weeks.
You can read
our fact-check of the Republican analysis
in its entirety. Here, we're looking only at the statement, "Page 313 - Section 512 imposes an 8 percent 'tax on jobs' for firms that cannot afford to purchase 'bureaucrat-approved' health coverage; according to an
analysis
by Harvard Professor Kate Baicker, such a tax would place millions 'at substantial risk of unemployment'—with minority workers losing their jobs at twice the rate of their white counterparts."
This point refers to the House bill's employer mandate, which requires large employers to offer health insurance for their workers. (This is a major difference with the Senate bill, which is not expected to include an employer mandate.)
So the House bill does tax employers that don't offer insurance. The Republicans say that Baicker's research shows that millions would be at risk for unemployment, and her research does show that.
But the number of people who would actually lose their jobs, according to her projections, is much smaller.
Baicker and co-author Helen Levy identified workers who lacked insurance and whose wages are so close to the minimum wage that employers will not be able to reduce their pay in order to pay for health insurance. That pool of uninsured, low-wage workers is 5.5 million.
Of those, however, she concluded that a much smaller number — 224,284 — were "likely" to lose their jobs. And about 136,342 were likely to be racial and ethnic minorities, she concluded.
Baicker and Levy also wrote that those numbers would be fewer if small employers were exempt from the mandate. And the House bill does just that: It exempts employers with a payroll of less than $500,000.
We contacted Baicker, who also added the following note of clarification: "Our estimates were done years ago and were meant to model a stylized mandate policy, not any of the actual policies under consideration at the moment. The effect on employment will be driven by a lot of the details, such as which workers are included based on number of hours worked and which firms are included based on firm size."
So the House Republican Conference takes a study that looked at a general policy, not the details of the current House bill. Additionally, the exemption for small employers would reduce the number of workers who would be at risk for losing their jobs. So we rate this statement Half True.
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Seeking to jump-start efforts to pass a health care bill, President Barack Obama defended his reform plan in a speech to a joint session of Congress.
He sought to reassure Americans they would not lose their current coverage.
"First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have," Obama said. "Let me repeat this: Nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have."
Obama is correct that the plans under consideration do not force those who currently have insurance to change plans. The proposals seek to build on the current system, where many Americans get coverage through work.
The plans do, however, implement new consumer protections and introduce new ways of regulating health insurance companies.
These new rules will surely change the current health care system. The bill in the House of Representatives gives employer-provided insurance five years to come into compliance with new rules, such as caps on out-of-pocket expenses and coverage for preventive care.
Right now, employers have the freedom to change or drop coverage, and they will continue to have that freedom under health reform. Doctors, too, can opt in or out of accepting various insurance plans, including Medicare. Because of this inherent instability to the health care system, and because of the new regulations, we rated one of Obama's earlier statements on the effects of reform — "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan" —
Half True
.
Given what we know about reform, it seems likely that at least some people will have employers who decide to change plans when insurers alter their offerings under the new regulations. This would be most likely for any small businesses that currently offer health insurance. They will be allowed to use a national exchange where insurers compete to offer insurance, and prices are expected to be lower.
Obama's statement from the speech is more carefully phrased than his earlier statement. In his speech, he said that if you are "already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have." That is true, there is nothing in the plan that proactively forces these kinds of changes, and the bills clearly intend to leave much of the current health care system in place. We rate Obama's statement True.
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Normally, modesty would forbid us factchecking an item about media factchecking.
But we couldn't ignore statements in a recent e-mail from Organizing for America, the Democratic advocacy group that emerged from Barack Obama's campaign organization.
"Friend," begins a
fundraising e-mail
from the group signed by director Mitch Stewart. "Over the past few months, two things have become clear about the fight for health insurance reform.
"1. Our opponents will create and spread outrageous lies to try to stop President Obama from creating real change. 2. We just can't count on the media to debunk them."
The e-mail asks for cash contributions to help Organizing for America fight back.
"Stepping in when the media fails is a daunting challenge," Stewart writes, "But this community has already come together and accomplished feats no one thought possible. ... Please donate today to get the truth out."
Lest we be accused of
tooting
our
own
horn
here, we'll confine ourselves to a review of some of the
other
media coverage of the health reform battle.
Factcheck.org has debunked many false claims, including an e-mail analysis of
what's in a bill
being considered in the House of Representatives, as well as a list of "
seven big myths
" about health reform.
CNN's "Truth Squad" has looked at whether you have to go blind
in one eye
before getting eye care (wrong!) and many other false claims about health care. The Truth Squad cataloged all their fact-checks on their
Political Ticker blog
.
There's also the Associated Press. They reported several fact-checking pieces, including looking at claims
Obama has made
, as well as claims about
euthanasia
and
illegal immigrants
.
CQ Politics
reported a story
on whether health care would be rationed, whether employees could be automatically enrolled in a public plan, and whether the government would have real-time access to bank accounts, among other things. Nope, nope and nope.
We could go on (and on), but you get the picture. There is no shortage of reporting on false claims about health care.
We know, based on our own reader e-mail, that there is still a lot of confusion about health care reform and what it entails, including among those who are truly undecided. And we've also heard from readers who have negative, factually incorrect ideas about health care reform and don't want to be argued out of their beliefs.
Mitch Stewart of Organizing for America might not like the fact that some Americans remain unconvinced. They also probably don't like it that town halls during August have been packed with people making erroneous claims, or that some pundits think Obama is losing the debate over health care.
But for Organizing for America to say that the media isn't debunking false claims about health care is wrong -- demonstrably wrong. In fact, it's laughably delusional. We rate their statement Pants on Fire!
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The pundits and prognosticators are saying President Barack Obama is losing his mojo.
And they have facts to back up their claim.
"Since World War II, only Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton have had worse ratings after seven months than President Obama," said Republican Newt Gingrich, offering advice to Obama on the op-ed page of the
Washington Post.
Gingrich's comment was part of a roundup of advice solicited by the
Post
for the supposedly faltering president; Gingrich advised Obama to reject his left-leaning supporters and move to the center.
Being but humble fact-checkers, we can't speak to the wisdom or folly of Gingrich's advice. But we certainly can check his factual statement about Obama's poll numbers, a claim we've seen repeated in other media.
The Gallup poll actually has been tracking presidential approval ratings since World War II. We consulted Gallup's tracking polls and found that Gingrich is correct. At the seven-month mark, Obama's approval rating was 51 percent. The only two presidents doing worse than Obama were Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton.
Interestingly, Ford and Clinton finished their presidencies with decidely different outcomes.
Ford's public approval ratings dropped below 50 percent about three months into his presidency. Those numbers improved slightly and plateaued over the next few years. But Ford, who took office upon Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, lost the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter.
Clinton's approval ratings dropped below 50 percent four months into his presidency, falling even further during his first year in office to the high 30s. There were a few more ups and downs during his first term, but he won re-election in 1996 and finished his term in 2001 with approval ratings above 60 percent, despite being impeached by the House of Representatives after a sex scandal.
Make of all this what you will. We've looked into Gingrich's statement and found that he is correct. We rate his statement True.
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It's become a common refrain for Florida candidates: The state has one of the nation's highest foreclosure rates. Kendrick Meek, a member of Congress from South Florida and a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, mentions the foreclosure problem on his campaign Web site. "The housing crisis is one of the most critical issues facing Florida. Kendrick Meek believes more needs to be done to help Floridians in danger of losing their homes. Currently, one in five Florida families are one or more months behind in their mortgage payments, and the state has the second-highest foreclosure rate in the nation. Home values have dropped, leaving those who are able to keep their homes often owing more than their home is worth," writes Meek. We know the problem is more severe in Florida, but we wanted to know if Meek was right that the state has the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country.
The campaign said it relied primarily on a January 2009 report issued by RealtyTrac, a company that keeps data on foreclosed properties. That report highlights Florida as having both the second-highest number of foreclosed homes and the second-highest foreclosure rate (a subtle but important difference). The campaign also pointed us to South Florida Sun Sentinel article from December 2009 and a January 2010 Bay News 9 report that both say the same thing.
We started by checking the RealtyTrac report, which was released Jan. 15, 2009, and covers foreclosure statistics for 2008. Indeed, it put Florida in second place in both total foreclosed homes and the foreclosure rate. But that report is now more than a year old.RealtyTrac's monthly reports since then have varied slightly, but Florida is always near the top. It was fourth for January 2009, third in April and second in November. For all of 2009, Florida ranked third.So Meek is either right or close to being right, depending what time period you use. We find his claim Mostly True.
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Jan Patterson of Austin, a justice on the state's 3rd Court of Appeals since January 1999, touts her experience as she stumps to become the judge for the state's 201st District Court, which decides civil cases in Travis County. Its judge, Suzanne Covington, is stepping down.
Opposing Patterson in the March 2 Democratic primary is Austin lawyer Amy Clark Meachum, a partner in the law firm McGinnis, Lochridge & Kilgore. Meachum's readiness to be a judge draws fire from Patterson in a TV ad that debuted on Austin News 8 on Jan. 20, whose narrator writes Meachum off, saying: "Zero times a judge, zero rulings, zero experience on the bench — our legal system is no place for on-the-job training."
Meachum's campaign drew our attention to the ad when her field director, Katie Naranjo, issued this response: "Yesterday, Amy's opponent, Jan Patterson, launched a personal, negative television ad... if you are as disappointed as I am that Jan Patterson would resort to personal attacks against Amy, click here and make a contribution to our campaign so we can respond."
Meachum doesn't deny Patterson's charges, though, writing to us: "I have not hidden from nor run from the fact that I have never been a judge."
"In the past decade, I have more experience in the civil district court that I am running for than Justice Patterson does," she said. "She has been an appellate judge — I have been a civil trial attorney."
Meachum estimated that she's litigated 50-70 cases in Travis County.
Patterson is correct that Meachum has never been a judge. We rate her statement as True.
For the three Republicans running for a Texas House seat representing southwest Travis County, the campaign trail has turned into a trial over who's consorting with the enemy.
In that vein, transplanted Fort Worth lawyer Holly Turner has attacked opponent Paul Workman's voting history. In a radio ad that debuted Feb. 25, Turner accuses Workman of voting for Democrats.
"Official records show he voted in the Democrat primary, supporting Democrats with his vote," the narrator says.
Indeed?
Craig Murphy, Turner's spokesman, pointed to Travis County's voting records.
Our search shows that Workman voted in the 1994 Democratic primary, though he voted in the two previous GOP primaries and in eight Republican primaries from 1996 through 2010.
So over 20 years, Workman voted in every Republican primary except for one in '94.
What caused Workman to cross party lines and vote Democratic? We didn't find out; his campaign consultant, Eric Bearse, said Workman "doesn't recall voting in that primary."
The record shows he did.
We rate Turner's statement as True.
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It's going to be a long summer. It's only February and the barbs are already flying in the Republican campaign for U.S. Senate. (The primary isn't until Aug. 24.)In a recent press release, Gov. Charlie Crist fired off 10 claims about his opponent, former House Speaker Marco Rubio. One statement questioned Rubio's commitment to gun rights: "Speaker Rubio supported gun restrictions that included background checks and waiting periods."A candidate's stance on gun issues can be critical in a Republican primary. Some gun rights groups oppose restrictions such as these. We thought the statement merited further research.The claim stems from a January 2000 Miami Herald article. Rubio, then 28, was running in a special election for his first term in the Florida House. The Herald article profiled Rubio and his opponent and recounted their positions on key issues. It said, "Rubio supports 'reasonable restrictions' including background checks and waiting periods." It quoted Rubio saying, "However, I believe we should spend more time focusing on why people, especially children, are committing acts of violence."Asked about the passage in the article, Rubio spokesman Alex Burgos confirmed that it accurately described Rubio's position and said, "It's basically a restatement of his support for the current law."In 1990, Florida voters passed a law requiring a three-day waiting period to buy handguns. When the Brady Bill was enacted into federal law in 1993, it called for a five-day waiting period, but Florida's earlier law took precedence. The three-day waiting period is still in effect, unless the buyer has a license to carry a concealed weapon.Burgos noted that throughout his time in the Legislature, Rubio had an "A" rating by the National Rifle Association. Rubio voted for major NRA priorities such as a 2005 "castle doctrine" law allowing people to use deadly force if attacked in their home or any place a person "has a right to be." Rubio also supported a 2008 law allowing most employees to bring guns to work, as long as they held a concealed weapons license and kept the gun in their cars.Marion Hammer, a lobbyist for the NRA who served as its national president and has donated money to Crist's campaign, told PolitiFact Florida that Rubio's rating would go down when new grades are released in May. That's a reflection of several compromises in the "guns-at-work" bill that occurred during Rubio's time as speaker, she said. Rubio's record on guns as a House member is clear -- he voted with major NRA priorities and got an "A" rating for each of his elections, at least until now. But Crist accurately claimed that Rubio supported laws that instituted waiting periods and background checks on gun owners. Crist's statement earns a True.
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Rep. Patrick Kennedy gave a strong defense of Democratic plans for health reform on the House floor, attacking Republican opponents as defenders of insurance companies.
"The other side talks about the health care reform bill costing a lot of money," Kennedy said. "Right now, consumers in America are spending millions and millions of dollars paying that to the insurance companies. One-third of the health care dollar goes to no such thing as health care; it goes to the insurance companies. That's why the Democratic proposal restricts the amount of money that insurance companies can spend on bureaucracy."
The idea that insurance companies get a third of all health spending in the country struck us as suspicious. And sure enough, our research showed that Kennedy was mixing up his statistics.
To start with, every health insurance company is different, and there are different ways to count administrative expenses. Generally speaking, the most efficient insurers cover large groups of employees, while the least efficient sell policies to individuals.
Nevertheless, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a federal agency, publishes national health expenditure data, which include a breakdown of "The Nation's Health Dollar." The most recent data for 2007 show that private insurers get a little less than 7 percent of the nation's health care spending.
The 7 percent number also includes some of the administrative costs of government health insurance programs and charity programs, but the center said most of that is for private insurers.
We reviewed another study done by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It looked at administrative costs from a different angle, trying to focus on what percentage of health insurance premiums went to patient costs. Keep in mind, spending on private health insurance premiums is less than all national health care spending, which includes government spending for Medicare and Medicaid, and other expenditures.
The CBO included a bunch of things under administrative costs: marketing; claims processing; managing contracts with doctors and hospitals; quality assurance; regulatory compliance; information technology expenses; general overhead; profits and taxes. It found that the percentage of premiums going to all these activities was 12 percent.
We asked Kennedy's office about his statement, and staffers said Kennedy meant to say that he was talking about administrative expenses throughout the health care system. They sent us a study from the
New England Journal of Medicine
that examined administrative costs for doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, home care agencies and employers who provide insurance. The study found total administrative costs for all those groups accounted for 31 percent of health care expenditures in the United States.
Still, that's not anywhere close to what Kennedy said. He said that "One-third of the health care dollar goes to no such thing as health care; it goes to the insurance companies." The actual number is about 7 percent. We rate Kennedy's statement False.
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With conservative Marco Rubio nipping at his heels in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist is trying to pump up his conservative credentials.
In a new radio advertisement for his campaign, he says, "Here in Florida, I’ve slashed government by 10 percent. That’s $7 billion." It’s a statement Crist has also made on the campaign trail, and at a Hillsborough County Republican Party fundraiser earlier this month.
It’s true that Florida’s budget has dropped by 10 percent, or about $7 billion, since Crist was elected governor in November 2006. The budget passed by the Legislature and approved by then-Gov. Jeb Bush in May 2006 came in at $73.9 billion. This year’s spending plan tops out at $66.5 billion.
But can Crist, as his radio ad claims, really take credit for the cuts?
In 2007, Crist did veto $459 million from the state budget, setting a state record with his veto pen.
But the Florida Constitution requires that state lawmakers prepare a balanced budget, which is built around revenue generated by sales taxes, corporate taxes, other taxes and fees, and federal appropriations.
And since 2007, that revenue has declined significantly as the nationwide recession has taken hold. State budget documents show that in the 2006-2007 fiscal year, $31.7 billion was available in the general revenue fund. This year, the fund had only $21.9 billion. (In fiscal year 2007, the fund had $28 billion, and in 2008, it had $24.3 billion.)
With revenue down and a constitutional requirement for a balanced budget, Crist had to either cut spending or raise taxes.
"This is not a concerted effort on the part of our governor and Legislature to cut the budget," said Dominic M. Calabro, president and CEO of Florida TaxWatch. "It is because of the worst economy Florida has had since the Great Depression."
Crist has defended the budget-cut claim by saying that in other states, taxes were increased to cover shortfalls. While Crist didn’t push for tax increases to make up the entire shortfall, he did approve fee and tax increases this year — on everything from fishing licenses to initial vehicle registrations to cigarettes — that total $2.2 billion.
So while it is true that state government has shrunk by 10 percent since Crist’s election, it had little to do with him, and a lot to do with the shrinking economy. For those reasons, we give Crist’s statement a 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.
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In his weekly address, President Barack Obama warned health insurance companies not to derail health care reform, and he praised the progress Congress has already made.
Obama said a broad coalition of supporters including "doctors and nurses, workers and businesses, hospitals and even drug companies — folks who represent different parties and perspectives, including leading Democrats and many leading Republicans" were pushing reform forward.
"Just this week, the Senate Finance Committee approved a reform proposal that has both Democratic and Republican support," he said.
It was the last statement that caught our attention. Leaders of the majority party often boast about bipartisan support when in fact they have only a handful of votes from the minority. But in this case, Obama so far has just one Republican in the Senate.
The Senate Finance Committee voted to approve a version of the health care overhaul on a vote of 14-9 on Oct. 13. Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine, voted with the Democrats. Every other Republican on the committee opposed the measure.
Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican member on the committee, called the measure partisan and deeply flawed.
So Obama is technically correct that the proposal had "Democratic and Republican support." But he didn't mention that it got only one Republican vote, which meant the nine other GOP senators voted against it. That's not exactly a robust example of bipartisanship. So we rate his statement 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.
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Margaret Gomez, a Democrat up for re-election as Travis County's Precinct 4 commissioner, has positioned herself as a candidate for the people. Lately, she's boasted about stopping Capital Metro, Austin's public transit authority, from increasing bus fares for seniors and people with disabilities.
From a campaign flier distributed after the South Austin Democrats endorsed Gomez on Jan. 12: "Margaret Gomez has delivered results for Southeast Travis County... (she) stopped Capital Metro from raising fares for senior and disabled citizens."
Gomez, a commissioner since 1995, served as the county's appointee to the board that oversees Capital Metro from 1997 through 2009 including a closing 19-month run as the board chair.
Gomez's campaign pointed to the successful motion she made during a November board meeting to exempt seniors and people with disabilities from a bus and rail fare hike. The board voted 4-1 to increase the fare for a one-way bus ride to $1 and increase other discounted fares — like the 31-day adult bus pass — by more than 100 percent.
The new fares kicked in Jan. 18. Thanks to the exemption initiated by Gomez, older and disabled riders continue to ride for free.
Before the vote, Gomez had posted a statement posted on a pro-Democratic blog, the Burnt Orange Report: "I do not believe that we should balance the agency's budget on the backs of the elderly and disabled citizens, which is why I will ask the board to exempt seniors and disabled citizens from any fare increase."
Yet Gomez wasn't always committed to sparing those riders from paying fares, as her record on the transit agency board shows.
In May 2008 board members — including Gomez — twice voted unanimously in favor of a two-step fare increase plan that would have doubled the price of bus fare to $1 by 2011. Seniors and people whose disabilities weren't severe enough to qualify for the special door-to-door transit services required by federal law would have started paying 50-cent fares.
The plan went to the Local Government Approval Committee, an ad hoc body of elected officials — Gomez not included — which amended the board's proposal and opted not to charge seniors and disabled citizens while it raised other Capital Metro fares that year..
In August 2009, Capital Metro staff members proposed to the board steeper fare increases that it wanted to kick in several months sooner than the original hikes were planned to go into effect, including charging 25 cents for single rides for seniors and people with disabilities.
That's the proposal that was later amended, at Gomez's motion, to spare seniors and the disabled from the fare increase.
So did Gomez get it right? Did she stop the fare increase?
Sure she did, along with most fellow board members. She also earlier voted twice to advance plans subjecting seniors and the disabled to fare increases. But fares never raised for seniors and disabilities on her watch.
We rate Gomez's claim Mostly True.
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Kinky Friedman, seeking the Democratic nod for state agriculture commissioner, suggests the Republican incumbent, Todd Staples, let down his guard a couple years ago.
Responding to a question from the League of Women Voters of Texas, Friedman said: "The current commissioner allowed tainted beef to be sent to school cafeterias."
His stomach-churning charge drew our attention.
The candidate’s campaign pointed us to a February 2008 press release issued by Staples giving clearance to school districts to comply with a nationwide recall of more than 765,000 pounds of tainted beef. The release states: "Currently, 462 Texas school districts and other entities enrolled in the school breakfast and lunch programs have reported to have meat on hold and now can begin the disposal process."
The release doesn’t say if or how Staples allowed the tainted beef get to Texas schools. But Friedman spokesman Jason Stanford said it shows "this was allowed to happen on Staples’ watch."
We wondered what role the Texas Department of Agriculture plays in determining what foods get delivered for school meals.
Staples’ spokesman Bryan Black confirmed that the Texas department distributes food commodities purchased by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Black conceded too those deliveries would have included the beef that was later targeted for disposal.
Yet Black insisted that nothing in state law permits the commissioner to tell districts what foods to order or not.
His point: Staples couldn't have stopped--or disallowed--schools from taking the beef; the state department is responsible only for ensuring that food ordered through the USDA's commodity program--whatever the foods are--gets delivered.
Spokeswoman Jean Daniel of the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, which administers USDA's food nutrition programs, echoed Black's claim.
Daniel said state officials such as the Texas agriculture commissioner don't determine which suppliers provide food either through federally purchased commodities, which account for 15 to 20 percent of the food in school meals nationwide, or local purchases from commercial suppliers, handled by school districts. Daniel said she didn't know of any instance of a state-level official intervening in school district food purchases unless they were alerted to a recall.
In 2008, Black said, Staples acted because the federal government told states that the beef was unfit for human consumption. The state agency helped ensure the disposal of the beef and reimbursements to districts.
It's true that the Texas agriculture commissioner is responsible for overseeing the distribution of federal commodities for school meal programs.
But we found no evidence that Staples had the authority to allow districts to get the bad beef.
We rate Friedman's statement as False.
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In an e-mail blast, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a Republican, told supporters that spending in Washington is out of control.
Dewhurst spiced his Tuesday e-mail with a reference to the Democratic House speaker, stating that "during the recent global warming summit in Copenhagen, Nancy Pelosi and others stayed at a five-star hotel on a trip costing nearly $10,000 per person."
The House speaker living large in Denmark? We checked into that.
Dewhurst’s campaign pointed us to a USA Today post online reflecting on a report by CBS News, which reviewed travel vouchers filed by Pelosi’s office after the international climate summit in December. A summary of the travel vouchers filed by Pelosi’s office states that air fare, food and lodging costs for 57 people including Pelosi added up to $553,564. That works out to $9,711 per person.
CBS found that a factor in the travel costs was that the host hotel, a five-star Marriott, required guests to pay for six nights’ stay even if they were staying two nights, as Pelosi did. CBS also said that in fairness, "many attendees told us they did a lot of hard work, and laid the groundwork for a future global treaty."
Pelosi's food and lodging expenses totaled $4,406 (she, like many, took a military jet to the summit). She declined to discuss the trip costs, CBS said.
Pelosi personally accounted for less than 10 percent of the costs reported by her office for dozens of individuals. Still, Dewhurst correctly summarized the overall per-person travel costs.
We rate Dewhurst’s statement as True.
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The first presidential debate focused on the economy and foreign affairs, and Barack Obama and John McCain discussed a broad range of topics that included the economic bailout, the Iraq war and . . . whether South Koreans are taller than North Koreans.
McCain called North Korea the "most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average South Korean is 3 inches taller than the average North Korean, a huge gulag." (That statement occurs about 1:00 into the accompanying video.)
We've examined a lot of unlikely facts in this campaign, including
the cooking of squirrels
and the
regulation of ham and cheese sandwiches
, but this was a new one to us. So we did some checking and found that McCain is right. South Koreans are, indeed, taller than North Koreans.
In his study
Height and weight differences between North and South Korea,
Daniel Schwekendiek, an economist from the University of Tuebingen in Germany, compared 2002 data that showed preschool children in North Korea were up to 5 inches shorter and up to 14 pounds lighter than children who were brought up in South Korea.
A 2006 study of 1,075 North Korean defectors aged 20 to 39 put the difference for adults at 4 inches for men and 2.5 inches for women. A 2004 study said the difference was 2.3 inches for young men and 1.6 inches for young women.
The studies blame malnutrition in North Korea for the height difference.
So McCain is on solid ground with his claim. The studies vary, but his 3-inch claim is a reasonable approximation of the various studies and his underlying point is correct. We find his claim to the True.
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At the presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., Barack Obama described his tax plan and said, "Here's what I can tell the American people: 95 percent of you will get a tax cut."
We checked a similar claim of Obama's recently, that 95 percent of
working families
would get lower taxes under Obama's plan, and
found it to be True
.
But Obama stretched things when he said that 95 percent of "you" — everyone — would receive a tax cut.
The part of Obama's tax plan that results in widespread tax cuts is a tax credit for workers, intended to offset payroll taxes. Single workers would get $500, and working couples would get $1,000.
But not all taxpayers get paychecks from an employer, and those who don't would not get the credit. Additionally, Obama intends to raise taxes on higher brackets ($200,000 for singles and $250,000 for couples) which would offset any tax cuts for those incomes.
A detailed analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that if you look at all tax filers, 81 percent of tax filers would see reduced taxes under the Obama plan.
So Obama's statement at the debate glosses over a few important details about who would get tax cuts under his plan. If you're talking about everyone, it's 81 percent. If you're talking about working families, it's 95 percent. The difference between 81 percent and 95 percent is not insignificant. We rule his debate statement Half True.
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During the presidential debate, John McCain said Barack Obama voted to raise taxes on the middle class.
"He has voted in the United States Senate to increase taxes on people who make as low as $42,000 a year," McCain said.
"That's not true, John. That's not true," Obama said, interrupting him.
"And that's just a fact. Again, you can look it up," McCain said.
We looked it up already because
it's not the first time
McCain has made this statement.
To support the claim, the McCain campaign has pointed to two votes Obama made on budget resolutions, one in March 2008 and another in June 2008.
Problem is, neither of these votes actually raised taxes, nor were they expected to.
Instead, the votes approved budget resolutions, which are blueprints for the federal budget. The resolutions set targets for the committees that write legislation on taxes and spending. Obama joined Democrats on what were largely party-line votes, expressing the desire to roll back the Bush tax cuts in order to fund popular programs. The tax cuts would have been rescinded on people making about $42,000 and higher.
The McCain campaign is correct that Obama voted for the measures, which expressed approval for tax increases. But it's inaccurate to suggest votes on nonbinding budget resolutions, which don't have the force of law and don't include precise details on taxes or spending, are the same as votes on legislation that sets policy.
The statement also suggests that Obama as president would favor tax increases for incomes of $42,000. He does not. Obama's tax proposals are crafted so that tax increases hit those couples $250,000 or more a year, or $200,000 for singles. He also proposes a $1,000 tax credit on income for working families ($500 for singles).
McCain here makes his statement on a vote that would not have directly changed the tax code. We find the statement 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.
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During the presidential debate, John McCain and Barack Obama sparred over taxes.
McCain discussed his support for a reduction in corporate tax rates, which he said would help create jobs. A few moments later, he criticized Obama for voting for the 2005 energy bill, which McCain said was full of unnecessary spending.
"It was festooned with Christmas tree ornaments," McCain said. "It had all kinds of breaks for the oil companies, I mean, billions of dollars worth. I voted against it; Sen. Obama voted for it."
"John, you want to give oil companies another $4-billion," Obama retorted.
We've checked the controversy over
Obama's energy vote previously
. We found the bill, which did become law, included both incentives for clean energy and tax breaks for oil companies. Obama
has said
he felt the good in the bill outweighed the bad.
Here, we'll look at Obama's claim that McCain wants to give oil companies $4-billion in tax breaks, a claim he's made several times.
The Obama campaign defends this claim because McCain supports cutting corporate taxes, reducing them from a maximum rate of 35 percent to a maximum rate of 25 percent.
Based on that tax change, the Obama campaign estimates that oil companies would save $4-billion a year. Specifically, they cite a study from the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund. That group analyzed financial statements from the Securities and Exchange Commission for the five largest oil companies and calculated current and deferred taxes paid in 2007 to the federal government for income earned from U.S. operations. They then calculated how much less those companies would pay if the corporate tax rate were dropped from 35 percent to 25 percent. The total savings to the five oil companies, $3.8-billion; $1.2-billion Exxon Mobil alone.
In our previous look at this $4-billion claim, Obama didn't mention McCain's position on cutting corporate taxes for all companies. We concluded that Obama was cherry-picking by singling out oil companies. That led us to rule his statement Barley True.
But at the debate, the two candidates had just discussed McCain's position on corporate taxes and were talking about how overarching policy could affect tax breaks for oil companies. The context of the exchange explained McCain's overall policy on corporate taxes. As a result, when Obama made the claim in the debate, it was True.
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An anonymous e-mail making the rounds claims that Congress has its own selfish reasons for bailing out the insurance company American International Group, better known as AIG.
"Remember when this economic crisis hit, and Congress let Bear Sterns go under, pushed a bunch of forced marriages between banks, etc.?" the e-mail asks.
"Then they bailed out AIG. At the time, I thought: 'That's strange. What does an insurance company have to do with this crisis?'
"I think I just found the answer. Among other things, AIG INSURES THE PENSION TRUST OF THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS!! No wonder they got bailed out right away!"
Note the classic signs of the chain e-mail — all capital letters and LOTS OF EXCLAMATION POINTS!!! But we digress ...
To recap the history here, AIG is an insurance company that collapsed in September 2008. Because the firm had so many obligations, the federal government concluded the broader economy could be badly damaged if AIG were simply allowed to go under.
So the government gave AIG access to credit to make good on its obligations, more than $150 billion so far. AIG has in turn paid billions to customers such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wachovia.
We looked into the claim that AIG insures the pensions of members of Congress.
"It's not true — totally bogus," said Mike Orenstein, spokesman for U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which oversees federal pensions. He said he's been asked the question at least three times since the beginning of the year.
AIG does sell retirement services like annuities. But it does not insure federal pensions, said AIG spokesman Joseph Norton.
Next we turned for confirmation to the National Taxpayers Union, a nonprofit advocacy group that favors lower taxes and smaller government.
"Neither federal pensions in general nor congressional pensions in particular are insured by any private entity," said Pete Sepp, vice president for policy and communications.
The government doesn't need to insure its pensions because the pensions are ultimately paid for by government revenues. That means Congress will get their pensions "until the federal government itself goes broke. If that were to happen, we would be a Third World country," he said.
The National Taxpayers Union believes this dynamic puts off needed reforms to the Civil Service Retirement System and Social Security, he added.
We should add that Congress members do not receive their full salary for life, as some Internet sources suggest. (This year, congressional pay is scheduled to be $174,000 a year, though there is a possibility Congress will reject a recent cost-of-living raise.) Instead, members accrue benefits based on how long they serve. In 2006, the average pension was about $61,000 a year for 20 years of service, according to the Congressional Research Service.
If anyone insures congressional pensions, it's U.S. taxpayers, not AIG. The chain e-mail that claims AIG insures congressional pensions is just plain wrong. In fact, we rate it Pants on Fire!
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Lots of elected officials expressed outrage at the news that failing insurance company AIG was giving large bonuses to employees while accepting taxpayer money to stay afloat. But few expressed their outrage with AIG officials as starkly as Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa.
"I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Grassley said. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide."
"And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."
The next day, Grassley specified that he was not suggesting AIG executives should kill themselves, though he did say he wanted an apology.
We wondered if Grassley was right that Japanese executives who make significant mistakes often apologize and then resign or commit suicide.
We found many news stories of Japanese executives apologizing, a process in which the person stands and bows deeply. One story we found about a Sony battery problem detailed the exact posture of the executives. It noted they were seated while they bowed "and did not bow deeply," which signaled how Sony had been reluctant to admit fault. The story noted that none of the Sony executives resigned.
We also spoke with Gary Knight, a professor of international business at Florida State University who teaches annual business courses in Japan.
Knight confirmed that apologies and resignations are more common among Japanese executives than their U.S. counterparts.
"Culturally, it's pretty different than the U.S.," Knight said. "It's certainly the norm that if a top executive commits a blunder that affects employees or customers, they would apologize for it."
Resignations are common, too, though that doesn't always solve problems, Knight said.
"The person resigning may be the most knowledgeable person at the firm. Meanwhile, you're faced with finding a manager who can solve the problem," he said.
But executive suicides — not so common. Knight said they happen occasionally, but overall they are "pretty rare."
Suicide in Japan is actually a serious social problem, according to several news reports. More than 30,000 people a year commit suicide in Japan, giving it one of the highest suicide rates among industrialized countries.
None of the reports we reviewed singled out shamed executives, however. In fact, the most commonly cited groups of special concern were laid-off workers, the elderly and the young.
In conclusion, we find that Grassley gets the apologies and resignations right, but overstates the regularity of suicides. Apologies appear to be much more common than suicides. So we rate his statement Half True.
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In his first major education speech, President Obama endorsed charter schools, merit pay for teachers and increases in school spending. He justified his agenda partly by saying American students are slipping compared to counterparts around the world.
"We've let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us," Obama said in the March 10 speech to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. "In eighth grade math, we've fallen to ninth place."
Since Obama brought up math, we decided to check his. Turns out we had to pull out the red pen.
We asked the White House to defend Obama's claim, and received no response. His claim that eighth grade math students in the United States are in ninth place internationally almost certainly comes from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a periodic comparison of math and science achievement carried out since 1995 by research institutions and government agencies worldwide.
The
most recent study
, published in 2007, did indeed show U.S. eighth graders in ninth place behind five East Asian countries and Hungary, England and Russia.
But it was misleading to say they had "fallen" to ninth place. In 1995, they
came in 28th
. In 1999, they
moved up to 19th
. In 2003, they climbed
to 15th
. So rather than falling, U.S. students have actually
improved
in the past decade.
We considered giving the president partial credit since American students did come in ninth. But the point of his statement was that they had "fallen" to that position and that mathematics performance in the United States is getting worse relative to other countries. And that's just plain False.
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A joke meant to highlight a serious issue about wasteful federal spending apparently went over well enough before an audience in Orange County, Calif., last month, that John McCain decided to trot it out before a national audience at the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, 2008.
"You know, we spent $3-million to study the DNA of bears in Montana," McCain said at the debate. "I don't know if that was a criminal issue or a paternal issue, but the fact is that it was $3-million of our taxpayers' money. And it has got to be brought under control."
The bear study in Montana has become a go-to line in McCain’s stump speeches, and we fact-checked an almost identical line when McCain said it before an audience of evangelicals at Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., on Aug. 16, 2008.
The U.S. Geological Survey is indeed conducting a study that involves the DNA of bears in Montana, but the
Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project
actually has received more earmarked funding than McCain mentions — to the tune of $4.8-million, according to Katherine C. Kendall, the researcher in charge of the study.
The study had received $3.1-million in earmarked money by 2003, the year McCain first started taking aim at the project (he mentioned it on the Senate floor as part of a speech criticizing earmarks). But apparently McCain's campaign rhetoric hasn't been updated to reflect the additional $1.69-million the study's gotten since 2003.
And, strictly speaking, the point of the project isn't really to analyze the bears' DNA, it's to use their DNA to take a census. The researchers collect hair left when the grizzlies scratch themselves on trees, then use DNA extracted from the hair to identify individual bears. This helps researchers count the number of grizzlies that live in Montana, considered one of the last strongholds of this endangered species.
Kendall said it's a much cheaper — and safer — way to count them than traditional methods, which involve capturing grizzly bears and saddling them with satellite collars. It also has resulted in doubling the previous population estimates. The new figures, when paired with the results of another study on population trends, may eventually lead to removing grizzlies from the endangered list.
McCain's math is a little dated. And he clearly is suggesting "the study of bear DNA" is a frivolous use of federal money, but we won't argue the merits of the project. McCain claims $3-million in federal money has been used to study the DNA of bears, and that's Mostly True.
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Sen. John McCain has a long reputation as an opponent of pork-barrel spending, those billions of dollars for local projects earmarked quietly every year into massive federal spending bills.
In the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, 2008, McCain said Sen. Barack Obama, in his relatively brief senatorial career, has asked for $932-million in pork for his home state of Illinois. Just to be sure everyone heard it, McCain cited the number three times.
"He has asked for $932-million of earmark pork-barrel spending, nearly $1-million dollars for every day that he’s been in the United States Senate," McCain said.
In response, Obama noted, correctly, that he has eschewed any pork spending for fiscal 2009.
Said Obama: "Well, Senator McCain is absolutely right that the earmarks process has been abused, which is why I suspended any requests for my home state, whether it was for senior centers or what have you, until we cleaned it up."
McCain shot back that Obama did not suspend his requests for pork-barrel projects until after he was running for president, and then reminded viewers of that number again.
"He didn’t happen to see that light during the first three years as a member of the United States Senate, $932-million in requests," McCain said.
And in case you missed it the first two times, McCain cited the number yet again a few minutes later.
"And Senator Obama is a recent convert, after requesting $932-million worth of pork-barrel spending projects."
We should note that PolitiFact has
found
that while McCain has a well-deserved reputation in Washington as a pork-buster, his record is not entirely pristine. For example, McCain in 2006 co-sponsored legislation that asked for $10-million for an academic center at the University of Arizona to honor the late United States chief justice William Rehnquist.
But as for his claim in the debate: Is it accurate?
Obama, on his Web site, has listed every earmark he’s requested – but not necessarily received – as a U.S. senator. It totals $931.3-million.
McCain is also correct that it comes to nearly a million dollars for every day that Obama’s been in the United States Senate, provided you include just working days.
The math goes like this: Obama was elected in 2004 and took office January 3, 2005. Since then, there have been about 930 working days, as they are defined by most people, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays, which would mean McCain would be completely right if he had specified working days.
Technically, Obama's been "in Congress" for more than 1,350 days, if you count weekends. So how many points do you take off for McCain not saying "every
working
day"? Not many. We say this claim is Mostly True.
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Early in the first presidential debate, Sen. John McCain veered into military history during a discussion of the financial crisis.
To make a point about accountability, he relayed an anecdote about Dwight D. Eisenhower. Only McCain got the story wrong in a way that undermined his point.
After moderator Jim Lehrer pressed McCain on whether he would support the financial bailout package Congress is crafting, McCain said, "I hope so, sure."
Then he said: "But there's also the issue of responsibility. You've mentioned President Dwight David Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, on the night before the Normandy invasion, went into his room and he wrote out two letters. One of them was a letter congratulating the great members of the military and Allies that had conducted and succeeded in the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever. And he wrote out another letter, and that was a letter of resignation to the United States Army for the failure of the landings at Normandy. Somehow, we've lost that accountability."
McCain went on to link Eisenhower and his letter to McCain's repeated calls in recent days that Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox resign for his role in the financial crisis.
McCain was almost certainly referring to
this note
, which Eisenhower, then the U.S. Army general commanding the Normandy assault, prepared and stuck in his wallet on June 5, 1944, the day before the invasion in case the mission failed.
It says: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."
A noble sentiment — but not a letter of resignation.
"That must be what McCain is referencing," said David Fitzpatrick, a military historian at the University of Michigan. "I never heard that Eisenhower had prepared a letter of resignation. That would be incorrect."
The invasion was a success and Eisenhower did not have to use the note.
McCain ought not use it either — at least not as an example of prewritten resignation letter. Though Eisenhower did intend to take responsibility for the failure, that's quite different from preparing to resign his generalship. We find this anecdote to be False.
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The public is skeptical of the massive Wall Street bailout plan pending on Capitol Hill. So during the first presidential debate, both candidates were reluctant to say precisely where they stood on the proposal that is likely to cost about $700-billion.
The same is true on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans sank a plan offered by a president from their own party, and offered one of their own that would include less taxpayer money. During the debate, John McCain complained that the House GOP members had been left out.
"I went back to Washington, and I met with my Republicans in the House of Representatives. And they weren't part of the negotiations, and I understand that," McCain said. "And it was the House Republicans that decided that they would be part of the solution to this problem."
But they were and are. If McCain's point is that Republicans have felt that Democrats – and President Bush – have tried to rush a deal, there's more evidence for that. When Democrats and President Bush claimed a deal was at hand on Sept. 25, 2008, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, said there was no deal. "There may be a deal among some Democrats, but House Republicans are not a part of it," he said.
Soon, House Republicans revealed that they were pushing a rival plan that would offer government insurance to failing firms in place of Bush's strategy, which involves the government purchasing bad debts held by U.S. and foreign banks.
Charges and countercharges flew. Republicans said Democrats were trying to rush a deal and prevent McCain – who had suspended his campaign to return to Washington to participate in the negotiations – from helping to forge an agreement. Democrats said Republicans were delaying unnecessarily in order to allow McCain to score political points.
But later that day, as
Congressional Quarterly
reported, Boehner's tone had moderated. "The speaker and I have worked together to try and craft a bipartisan plan that will pass the House," he said.
On its face, McCain's remark clearly is not accurate because Republicans were part of the discussion. But we'll give McCain a few points because it also is clear that Republicans didn't feel fully involved in negotiations because they expressed their frusration by killing the plan proposed by Bush. We'll rate it 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.
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Stung by charges that the economic stimulus bill that passed last month was packed with pork, Democrats are claiming the big 2009 spending bill they're now considering has a relatively small number of earmarks.
Many news outlets have cited Democratic estimates that there are only $3.8 billion in earmarks in the $410 billion bill, which is known as the Omnibus because it is the product of nine bills that failed to pass last fall. But Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent group that tracks federal spending, says the number is $7.7 billion.
Why the big difference?
The Democrats count the number differently.
Before we explain, here's a little context. These numbers aren't just a matter of arcane bookkeeping. They are significant because earmarks have become a key political issue. As a candidate, President Obama
promised to reduce earmarks
to the levels from 1994, the year that Republicans took control of Congress. So it's important to measure them accurately.
The Democrats' $3.8 billion figure has been widely reported. We found it in
Congressional Quarterly
, the
New York Times
,
the
Associated Press
and
USA Today
, among others. Most stories attribute the number to the Democratic leadership in Congress, while
USA Today
specifically cited Kirstin Brost, a spokeswoman for the Democratic staff of the House Appropriations Committee.
Brost told us that she specified to reporters that the number was for "non-project-based" federal programs, such as water projects for dams, navigational improvements and beach renourishment. These programs have such a high percentage of earmarks that Democrats exclude them from their totals. Their reasoning is that if they promise to cut earmarks by a certain percentage, as they have in the past few years, these programs will be disproportionately cut.
But Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said they should be included in the definition of earmarks because the projects being excluded meet Congress' own definitition — the funding is requested by lawmakers for specific projects that in most cases are in their districts or home states. (For more on the definition, see
this earlier PolitiFact item
on White House claims that there were no earmarks in the stimulus bill.)
"According to Congress, these are earmarks. So to say there are $3.8 billion in earmarks (in the Omnibus) is misleading at best," Ellis said.
Ellis invoked a weight-loss analogy to explain what the Democrats are doing.
"It’s easier to make your weight loss goals if you don’t count your rear end," he said.
Brost says she has been precise with reporters that she was referring to the "non-project-based" numbers. But judging from the number of times we found the number cited as the Democratic estimate for earmarks, her nuance was not caught by reporters or by Democrats who have cited the figure.
Either way, the number is not a fair account of the total earmarks. We find the Taxpayers for Common Sense estimate to be right and we find the statement False.
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The morning after the CNN/YouTube debate in St. Petersburg, John McCain remained firm in his stand against the use of an interrogation technique called "waterboarding." He cited solid history to buttress his position.
"I forgot to mention last night that following World War II war crime trials were convened. The Japanese were tried and convicted and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding," he told reporters at a campaign event.
"If the United States is in another conflict ... and we have allowed that kind of torture to be inflicted upon people we hold captive, then there is nothing to prevent that enemy from also torturing American prisoners."
McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding," according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.
R. John Pritchard, a historian and lawyer who is a top scholar on the trials, said the Japanese felt the ends justified the means. "The rapid and effective collection of intelligence then, as now, was seen as vital to a successful struggle, and in addition, those who were engaged in torture often felt that whatever pain and anguish was suffered by the victims of torture was nothing less than the just deserts of the victims or people close to them," he said.
In a recent journal essay, Judge Evan Wallach, a member of the U.S. Court of International Trade and an adjunct professor in the law of war, writes that the testimony from American soldiers about this form of torture was gruesome and convincing. A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.
We find McCain's retelling of history to be accurate, so we give him a True.
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Sen. John McCain was one of the few Republicans who opposed tax cuts proposed by President George W. Bush in 2001, and he opposed them again when they came up for renewal in 2003.
In 2001, McCain voted against a $1.35-trillion tax cut package, arguing that the tax cuts didn't do enough for the middle class, and because of a need for increased defense spending.
Two years later, McCain again citied fiscal prudence for opposing $350-billion in additional tax cuts, specifically citing the unknown costs for the war in Iraq.
"No one can be expected to make an informed decision about fiscal policy at this time," McCain said. "Let us wait until we have succeeded in Iraq."
When they came up for renewal again in 2006, though, he voted in favor of them.
McCain said he supported the tax-cut extensions, which also reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividend income, because "American businesses and investors need a stable and predictable tax policy to continue contributing to the growth of our economy. These considerations lead me to the conclusion that we should not reverse course by letting higher tax rates take effect."
In an interview on Fox News on Dec. 28, 2007, McCain expressed no regrets about his tax votes against Bush. He said he would have preferred a plan that included spending cuts as well as tax cuts, but added that he believes the tax cuts should now be made permanent.
"I had significant tax cuts, and there was restraint of spending included in my proposal," McCain said during the appearance on
Hannity & Colmes
. "I saw no restraint in spending. We presided over the greatest increase in the size of government since the Great Society. Spending went completely out of control. It's still out of control. Wasteful earmark spending is a disgrace, and it caused us to alienate our Republican base. So these tax cuts need to be made permanent. Otherwise, they would have the effect of tax increases. But, look, if we had gotten spending under control, we'd be talking about more tax cuts today."
Justifications aside, this is an actual change of position for McCain, so we rate his change on the Bush tax cuts a Full Flop.
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A chain e-mail claims that Sen. Barack Obama intends to raise pretty much all your taxes, while Sen. John McCain will leave them alone. The problem is that most of the e-mail's detailed assertions are false.
Here, we'll look at the e-mail's claims about McCain and the estate tax, which it refers to as the inheritance tax. For an examination of the e-mail's other claims, read
our full article here
.
The e-mail claims that President George W. Bush "repealed" the estate tax, and it now stands at 0 percent. Though Bush reduced the tax, he did not repeal it. Rather, under his 2001 tax cut package, the estate tax reduces every year and then goes away for just a single year — 2010 — before reverting back to higher rates. (See the nonpartisan
Tax Policy Center on estate taxes
for more details.)
Currently, the estate tax generally applies only to estates worth more than $2-million (or $4-million for couples). Above those amounts, the tax rate tops out at 45 percent. Both Obama and McCain support renewing the current estate tax with a few changes. McCain proposes to increase the exemption to $5-million ($10-million for couples) and reduce the tax rate to 15 percent. Obama proposes to increase the exemption to $3.5-million ($7-million for couples) and leave the top rate at 45 percent.
Although the e-mail captures the broad idea that McCain wants to reduce estate taxes more than Obama, it is wrong when it says McCain wants a "0 percent" estate tax, and it's also wrong that the estate tax is at zero percent now. We rate this statement False.
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A chain e-mail claims that Sen. Barack Obama intends to raise pretty much all your taxes, while Sen. John McCain will leave them alone. The problem is that most of the e-mail's detailed assertions are false.
Here, we'll look at the e-mail's claims about Barack Obama and the estate tax, which it refers to as the inheritance tax. For an examination of the e-mail's other claims, read
our full article here
.
The e-mail claims that President George W. Bush "repealed" the estate tax, and it now stands at 0 percent. Though Bush reduced the tax, he did not repeal it. Rather, under his 2001 tax cut package, the estate tax reduces every year and then goes away for just a single year — 2010 — before reverting back to higher rates. (See the nonpartisan
Tax Policy Center on estate taxes
for more details.)
Currently, the estate tax generally applies only to estates worth more than $2-million (or $4-million for couples). Above those amounts, the tax rate tops out at 45 percent. Both Obama and McCain support renewing the current estate tax with a few changes. McCain proposes to increase the exemption to $5-million ($10-million for couples) and reduce the tax rate to 15 percent. Obama proposes to increase the exemption to $3.5-million ($7-million for couples) and leave the top rate at 45 percent.
So the e-mail is wrong when it says McCain wants a "0 percent" estate tax and that Obama wants to "restore" it. We rule this statement False.
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Rudy Giuliani invokes his tough-on-terrorism image with a television advertisement about the Iran hostage crisis. He gets most of the facts correct but his insinuation that President Reagan deserves all the credit for the hostages' release is wrong.
Here is the transcript of his 30-second commercial, spoken as grainy black and white photos of hostages appear on the screen:
"I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we're facing.
"The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the Oath of Office as President of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don't back down. I'm Rudy Giuliani and I approve this message."
The script is technically accurate. On Nov. 4, 1979, militant Iranian students — not mullahs, as Giuliani says — took control of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 66 hostages. Of those, 52 remained in captivity for 444 days.
The terms of their release is the Algiers Accord, an agreement negotiated by Jimmy Carter's administration on Jan. 19, 1981, according to State Department documents. The following day at 12:23 p.m. EST, less than one hour after Carter relinquished the presidency to Ronald Reagan, the hostages were let go.
But just because it happened on Reagan's watch, doesn't mean he deserves credit, said Warren Christopher, Carter's deputy Secretary of State and lead negotiator for the United States.
"It happened that they did not hit Algiers until (Reagan) was in office about a half-hour," Christopher said. "But all the negotiations took place before the inauguration."
Temple University professor David Farber and journalist Mark Bowden both wrote books about the Iranian hostage situation and reach similar conclusions.
"The whole direction is misleading," Farber said. "Reagan had made no claims he would do something specifically different. There was no cause-and-effect relationship."
"(Giuliani) is reporting one of the standard glib historical assessments of the hostage crisis," Bowden said. "The idea that Reagan had any affect on their release is laughable."
Bowden said waiting until Carter left office had more to do with the Iranian leaders dislike of Carter "than a fear of Reagan," he added.
While Giuliani is technically correct that the hostages were released after 444 days in the first hour Reagan took office, Reagan wasn't responsible. So Giuliani's message doesn't match the facts. We rule this statement 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.
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Appearing on Fox News in October, Duncan Hunter proclaimed his support for allowing a religious slant on the flag-folding ceremony at U.S. military funerals. To defend his position, Hunter tapped a reliable and potent source to justify weaving church and state: George Washington.
"This is supposedly done under the separation of church and state, but you can't separate a veteran from his flag," Hunter told interviewer Bill Hemmer. "And, you know, our first president and our first commander in chief prayed every day. He had a field manual of prayers."
Whether Hunter knew it or not, Washington wasn't the most religious founding father. And the story of his personal prayer book was debunked in the early 20th century.
His remarks actually tap into a debate among scholars about the extent of Washington's religious convictions. Many argue he was more a deist than a Christian.
"It's a tricky area that keeps coming up again and again," said Phil Chase, a senior editor at the Papers of George Washington Project at the University of Virginia. "People tend to attribute their own views to someone in the past. ... It happens a lot with Washington."
Evangelical minister Tim LaHaye, author of the
Left Behind
series, is the latest. In his book about the founding father's faith, LaHaye wrote that the fact that Washington "was a devout believer in Jesus Christ and had accepted Him as His Lord and Saviour is easily demonstrated by a reading of his personal prayer book, written in his own handwriting."
Except that's not true. Washington scholar Rupert Hughes wrote in 1926 that no evidence connects Washington to this prayer book, which was found nearly a century after his death in a old trunk. Hughes consulted a penmanship expert who proved it wasn't even in Washington's handwriting.
"We are very confident that this prayer book is not Washington's prayer book," Chase said.
Fortunately for Hunter, it's a common myth. Otherwise, we might give him a Pants-on-Fire ruling.
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To justify her plan to use estate tax revenues for universal retirement accounts, Hillary Clinton told a voter in New Hampshire that history was on her side.
"People disagree about this, but the estate tax, which came into being by Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and others, and has been part of our tax system for a very long time, is there for a real simple reason: In America, we've never liked the idea of massive inherited wealth," she said during a town hall forum in Derry. "Part of the reason why America has always remained a meritocracy where you have to work for what you get ... is that we never had a class of people sitting on generation after generation after generation of huge inherited wealth."
Clinton's historical account, and dig at Republicans, shows selective memory.
Estate taxes — a tax on the property passed forward and received at death — were first levied in 1797 under President John Adams, a Federalist.
In that case, the revenue went to cover the cost of raising a Navy. The two subsequent times it was enacted, in 1862 and 1898, it paid for military conflicts (first the Civil War and then the Spanish-American War), before being repealed again.
Clinton is correct that Republican Theodore Roosevelt advocated renewing the estate tax. On Dec. 4, 1906, he told Congress, "The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the State, because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government."
But Roosevelt left office before it became law in 1916 — under President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, who used the tax to help pay for World War I.
Another Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, raised rates twice, in 1934 and 1935, to help fund federal programs during the Great Depression. At that time, he said, "The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people."
Since then, the estate tax has continued to increase as have the number and size of the exemptions. Under tax cuts passed by President Bush, it is being phased out by 2010. Clinton wants to abolish the tax cuts she said only help the wealthy and use the estate tax to fund a new retirement system.
While her sentiment closely resembles FDR's, her statements don't represent the full history behind the tax. We rule her statement 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.
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A trillion dollars? Really? That's a lot of money — $1,000,000,000,000, to be exact.
Obama is accurately quoting that number from a report issued by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. The report states, "If we were able to reduce obesity to 1980s levels, Medicare would save $1-trillion." It attributes the number to the Centers for Disease Control and the Commonwealth Fund.
At issue is the increased prevalence of obesity. The percent of the U.S. population considered to be obese has roughly doubled since the 1980s. Researchers have documented that these people need more health care due to complications from obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain types of cancers and other illnesses. Researchers have also developed models to calculate costs for obesity-related health care.
We agree that obesity drives up health costs, but getting to $1-trillion just doesn't add up, according to our estimates. (Factcheck.org, a political fact-checking Web site at the University of Pennsylvania, found the same thing; check out their analysis
here
. ) The Centers for Disease Control cites a study on health spending due to obesity and overweight that shows numbers significantly less than $1-trillion.
We tracked down one of the authors of the study the CDC cited: Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with the research group RTI International who has studied the issue extensively and written several papers on the topic. Finkelstein said obesity accounts for excess health spending of about $90-billion a year. About half of that — about $45-billion — is billed to Medicare and Medicaid together.
Medicare's share of obesity spending therefore is between $20-billion and $25-billion. If obesity rates rolled back to 1980s levels, Medicare spending would be about half that, or about $12-billion a year.
Now we get to the slipperiness of Obama's quote. He says if obesity rates rolled back, Medicare would save $1-trillion. But he doesn't give a time frame, and neither does the report he's quoting from. Maybe he meant it would have saved $1-trillion since the 1980s.
But that doesn't make sense either. At the rate of $12-billion of savings per year, it would take more than 80 years to reach $1-trillion. Let's say our estimate is too conservative and it's $20-billion per year. It would still take 50 years to reach $1-trillion in savings. Inflation might get you there a bit faster, but not by that much. The number $1-trillion is just so big that increments of $10-billion won't get you there very quickly.
"I think it's a stretch," Finkelstein said.
We think so, too, and rate Obama's obesity claim False.
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In a town hall in St. Petersburg, Fla., an audience member challenged Obama about speaking out on issues affecting the black community, including the subprime mortgage crisis, among other issues.
"Why is it that you have not had the ability to not one time speak to the interests and even speak on behalf of the oppressed and exploited African community or the black community in this country?" the man asked.
Not true, Obama replied. "I think you're misinformed about when you say not one time. Every issue you've spoken about, I actually did speak out on," Obama said.
"I have repeatedly said that many of the predatory loans that were made in the mortgage system did target African-American and Latino communities," Obama said. He went on to defend his record on other civil rights issues.
We wondered if Obama's statement on the subprime mortgage was true, so we looked through press releases, transcripts and news stories to find out.
Most notably, on Oct. 18, 2007, Obama wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate subprime lenders to determine whether minority borrowers have been victims of discrimination.
Obama wrote in his leter that there was already substantial evidence to indicate this was so.
"Black families are paying more for home loans than similarly situated white families. Effective action to address this disparity is long overdue," Obama wrote.
On the campaign trail, Obama has also discussed the same issue several times, though we found most of our examples of him discussing it before Hispanic audiences.
On June 28, 2008, Obama told the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, "We have to stabilize the housing market. And the Latino community as well as the African-American community was particularly hard hit when it comes to foreclosures."
On Feb. 19, 2008, Obama was at a campaign event in San Antonio, Texas, and discussed the need for people having mortgage problems to receive help negotiating with their lenders. "My suspicion is that it's very important we have Spanish-speaking counselors because I know that both the African-American community and Hispanic community have been disproportionately targeted by some of these practices."
It's not a campaign theme he hits over and over again, but Obama has made the statement several times, and the 2007 letter is particularly strong evidence to bolster Obama's argument. We rule his statement True.
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As she makes her case for the White House, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., promises voters that she'll do more to help the middle and working classes. Key to that pitch is the notion that things aren't going so well now.
"Productivity has risen 18 percent among American workers over the past six years, yet wages have stayed flat, and family incomes have fallen by nearly $1,000," she told a crowd in New York City on Dec. 5, 2007. "There are 5-million more people in poverty here in our country than there were in 2000."
The macroeconomic forces of a rapidly changing global economy are causing more trouble for many working people than the Bush administration, despite what Clinton and other Democratic candidates suggest.
U.S. Census Data from 1995 to 2005 show that those wages are down or stagnant for workers who have the least education, while earnings have increased for those with college degrees.
Increased competition from cheap foreign labor is squeezing U.S. factory workers and costing jobs, while wages have not kept pace with rising energy and health care prices, several studies say, including the 2006 State of Working America by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan advocate for the poor.
Productivity indeed is up about 18 percent since 2000, but income is down, and nearly 5-million more people are living in poverty than at the height of the last business cycle in 2000, government statistics show.
"All of that paints more of a picture about what individual households are seeing and reacting to," said Aviva Aron-Dine, a policy analyst for the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, a nonpartisan advocacy group for the poor.
Clinton accurately portrays the economic challenges facing Americans - and the next president - as she campaigns. We find her statement true.
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In her speeches about the economy, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., often makes the point that the gap between rich and poor has grown during Bush's presidency.
"Thanks to President Bush's policies, the poor and middle classes are suffering economically, while the rich are prospering," Clinton said during a Nov. 19, 2007 speech in Knoxville, Iowa. "The income gap is now higher than at any time since the Great Depression."
In 2005, "the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans held 22 percent of America's income. That's an astonishing figure, and it is the highest level of income inequality since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929," she said.
Clinton's figures are essentially right. She gets them from an analysis of U.S. tax returns published in the
Quarterly Journal of Economics
in 2005 and updated this year, which found that the top 1 percent of earners, those making more than $350,500 per year, earned 21.3 percent of the nation's total income in 2005.
The U.S. Census Bureau shows a similar disparity, with the top 5 percent of Americans earning 22.3 percent of the income in 2006. Those in the top 20 percent earned about half of the nation's income, while the bottom 20 percent earned just 3.4 percent of the income.
However, while some of Bush's policies have favored the rich, economists say it is not fair to link the president to the rising income gap itself. This is a longtime trend that began to soar in the 1980s and has persisted throughout several presidencies. In fact, the income gap also reached new highs and grew more quickly during the administration of Bill Clinton, a Democrat and the husband of Sen. Clinton, than it has under President Bush.
Economists point to several reasons for the growth in disparity between the very rich and the rest of us, including the decline of labor unions, the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs to cheap labor overseas, rising executive pay, and the relative drop of the minimum wage from 1981 to 2007. While goods and services became more expensive, the minimum wage stayed the same.
Bush has, however, exacerbated the after-tax income inequality with tax cuts that disproportionately help the rich, economists said. He also has resisted congressional attempts to cut costs for the working poor, such as by opposing an expansion of a popular children's health insurance program that he says helps some who don't need it.
"(Bush) passively accepted many of the economic trends that pushed up inequality," said Gary Burtless, a senior fellow in economic studies at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. "But he is not mainly to blame for increased inequality."
Clinton is correct, that the income gap is soaring. But she's wrong to lay the blame on Bush. We find her statement Half-True.
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Fred Thompson, in arguing that the tax cuts of the Bush administration should be renewed, said that 5 percent of Americans pay over half the income taxes in this country, and that 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes at all.
Both figures are true.
The top 5 percent of all payers do pay more than half the income tax. They pay about 59.2 percent of all individual income tax, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan institute run jointly by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution.
Thompson also said that 40 percent of Americans pay no income tax. This claim is supported by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group that promotes transparency in the tax code and economic growth.
There's a small caveat to the 40 percent number — it includes nonfilers, typically taxpayers who don't have to file returns because their incomes are too low. It's logical to assume that most nonfilers don't pay income taxes, but it's possible that some did if they had income taxes withheld by an employer. This is probably a very small number, because people with low incomes have an economic incentive to file a return and get a refund.
The U.S. income tax system is progressive, which means that rates increase as income increases. Given that structure, it makes sense that people with higher incomes pay more taxes, and people with low incomes might pay no tax at all. Thompson's numbers are on the money, and we rate them True.
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In a packed town hall in Springfield, Mo., Sen. Barack Obama laid down the challenge for a duel.
His eyes weren't exactly squinting. And theme music to
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
could not be heard. But the gauntlet was dropped.
"I'm ready to duel John McCain on taxes," Obama said. "Right here. Right now."
Then Obama surprised the crowd.
"I don't know if people are aware of the fact," Obama said, "but the family legend is that Wild Bill Hickok, he's a distant cousin of mine."
The crowd roared with laughter. It seemed that perhaps the sun had gotten to him.
"I'm serious, I'm serious," Obama said. "I don't know if it's true, but that's the family legend. But we're going to research that."
No need, Sen. Obama. We called the New England Historic Genealogical Society. These are the folks who back in March released the study that found that Obama is a distant relative of actor Brad Pitt (ninth cousins, to be exact).
Chris Child, a staff genealogist, compared geneological charts for Obama and Hickok and...bang...there it was. The two trees intersected with one Thomas Blossom of Holland, who arrived in Plymouth, Mass., in 1629.
The two are sixth cousins
six
times removed, Child said. Whatever that means.
Seems quite a length for Obama to go to support a metaphor about dueling with your opponent over taxes, but then Hickok was also a noted gambler.
Obama also said that Hickok, the legendary frontier lawman, had his first duel in Springfield, Mo. While we were digging we looked that up, too. And Obama is right again. While it's hard for many historians to separate fact from legend, it is documented that James Butler Hickok (his name wasn't even William) got the better of former Confederate Army soldier Davis Tutt in a 1865 "quick draw" duel after a dispute involving gambling debts and, you guessed it, a woman.
In the ensuing years, Hickok boasted of killing more than 100 men. Though in his defense, he said they all had it coming.
Hickok got his in 1876 after he apparently broke the cardinal rule of gunfighters: He sat with his back to the door and was shot from behind while playing poker at a saloon in Deadwood, S.D. The story was that he was holding two pairs, aces and eights — hence the term "dead man's hand" still used today.
The relation to "Wild Bill" Hickok is way cooler than the revelations earlier this year that Obama is distantly related to none other than vice president Dick Cheney. Undoubtedly, Obama took a lot of ribbing over that. Maybe those jokesters ought to sleep with one eye open because Obama's "family legend" is correct. We rule the statement True.
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At a White House forum on fiscal responsibility on Feb. 23, Sen. John McCain complained to President Obama that cost overruns have dramatically increased the price tag for new presidential helicopters.
"Just one area that I wanted to mention that I think consumed a lot of our conversation on procurement was the issue of cost overruns in the Defense Department," McCain said at the forum. "We all know how large the defense budget is. We all know that the cost overruns — your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don't think that there's any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money."
We wondered if it was true that the Marine One presidential helicopter that carries 14 passengers could cost as much as the huge version of the Boeing 747 that is specially built for the president.
The Air Force One cost comparison has been frequently cited by critics of the helicopter contract, which has nearly doubled in cost since Lockheed Martin won it in 2005. The original estimate was $6.1 billion for 28 helicopters, but it is now estimated at $11.2 billion. That works out to $400 million each.
The two planes known as Air Force One, specially built Boeing 747 jets, were paid for in the late 1980s and delivered in 1990. We found a variety of price estimates for them. Several sources, including the book Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and Their Planes by Kenneth T. Walsh, mention an overall cost of about $330 million per plane (in 1990 dollars).
If that number is used for the comparison and adjusted to current dollars — about $517 million — then McCain is wrong because the plane costs more.
But taxpayers actually paid only $200 million per plane (about $315 million in current dolllars), according to an Air Force spokesman. Boeing had a fixed price contract with the Air Force and had to absorb the cost overruns. So under that figure ($315 million for the plane vs. $400 million for the copter), McCain is close. In fact, he could have said the helicopter would cost more.
So this one boils down to a question of what you consider to be the "cost" of Air Force One. It cost $550 million in current dollars to build , but the government paid just $315 million.
We think most people would judge it on the cost that taxpayers paid, since that's the comparison being made with the helicopter contract (which is not a fixed price contract), but McCain could have been clearer if he had specified that. So we find his statement Mostly True.
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Despite all the talk during the campaign about cutting earmarks, Congress is still packing them into appropriations bills.
Case in point: the big appropriations bill for 2009 that never got passed last fall and is now before Congress. It's an amalgamation of nine spending bills known on Capitol Hill as the Omnibus.
Members of Congress have talked a lot about cutting earmarks, the provisions that specify money for pet projects, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the Omnibus. On CNN's
American Morning
on Feb. 25, Sen. John McCain complained that the bill was packed with them.
"On the floor tomorrow or the next day of the Senate will be a bill with 9,427 pork barrel items," McCain said, noting that one provision would provide $2 million to promote astronomy in Hawaii.
Other Republicans have made similar claims. "There are nine appropriations bills that [Democrats] are going to wrap together that are $30 billion over budget in a bill that contains 9,000 earmarks. This is absolutely crazy," Rep. John Boehner, the House Majority Leader, said
in a Web video
.
We wondered if their numbers were right.
We should start by noting that there are differences in how groups define an earmark, something we explained when we checked the
White House claim that there were none
in the economic stimulus package. The House, Senate and the executive branch have different definitions, while we prefer the one in
Safire's Political Dictionary
that defines an earmark as money "that individual senators or representatives specify be directed to projects and activities that will benefit particular people, institutions or locations in their home constituencies."
McCain's office told us the 9,427 was a "preliminary number" that staffers got by simply counting member-sponsored projects in a draft of the House version of the bill.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington group that tracks federal spending, has a slightly lower number — 8,570 (down from 8,811 last year). That number includes anything defined by Congress as an earmark that doesn't mention the president as the person making the request. If you also include items requested by the president's budget that have been jointly requested by a member of Congress, the number comes to 9,287, according to TCS.
A McClatchy News Service story put the total earmarks at 9,000, attributing it to "congressional officials."
So McCain's number is in the same range as other counts and given slightly different definitions, it's possible to get different tallies. We find his claim to be True.
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With a plummeting stock market grabbing headlines, Barack Obama tackled the economy in a speech in Elko, Nev.
"Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it," Obama said. He then went through a litany of his tax proposals, including, "I will cut taxes — cut taxes — for 95 percent of all working families."
We've checked out
many claims on taxes
. It's a subject area that's ripe for distortion and attack.
But with this affirmative claim, Obama appears to be on solid ground.
The linchpin here is Obama's tax credit for workers, which is intended to offset payroll taxes. Single people can qualify for a $500 credit; married people filing together could get $1,000.
Obama wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts for people who make $200,000 or more if single and $250,000 or more as a married couple. His tax credits would phase out as they approach these incomes.
Most people, though, don't make more than $200,000. In fact, according to Internal Revenue Service statistics, about 97 percent of all filers made less than that.
Now it's into the nitty-gritty. Obama said his tax plan would reduce taxes for 95 percent of working families. We consulted the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which has created detailed models for how each candidate's tax proposal would affect American taxpayers. The center's complex model includes the indirect effects of certain tax policies, such as Obama's proposed rate increase for corporations.
The Tax Policy Center's analysis does not specifically look at the subset of tax filers who are "working families." But the center can make the following statements about Obama's tax proposal, said principal research associate Bob Williams:
• 95 percent of all tax filers (working and nonworking) will get a cut in their individual income taxes.
• 95 percent of all families with children (working and nonworking) will get a cut in their total federal taxes.
Every taxpayer has different individual circumstances, but if you make less than $200,000 a year and you work, we can't see how your taxes would go up under Obama's proposals. IRS data show that 97 percent of tax filers make less than $200,000, so there are even two percentage points worth of leeway there. We rate Obama's statement True.
UPDATE:
Since we published this item, the Tax Policy Center researched how Obama's tax proposals would affect workers. They concluded 94.3 percent of workers would receive a tax cut under Obama's plan;
read their research here
. This item was also updated to include information on Obama's tax credit phase out.
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Sen. Chris Dodd must have had the U.S. Census Bureau's 2005 report in his notes, because he quotes it very precisely.
"In 2005, 37.0-million people were in poverty, not statistically different from 2004," it says.
"In 2005, the number in poverty remained statistically unchanged from 2004 for people under 18 and people 18 to 64 years old (12.9-million and 20.5-million, respectively)," it goes on.
Dodd even says "about 12-million or 13-million are children," not looking too flashy by quoting the precise number of 12.9-million.
The U.S. Census Bureau's 2006 report, released in August 2007, is "not statistically different from 2005," although it lists the number of people living in poverty as 36.5-million and the number of children living in poverty as 12.8-million.
Either way, we rule Dodd's statement True.
A new TV ad from Joe Biden returns to the core theme of his campaign, that the Delaware senator has lots of experience with foreign policy.
The no-frills ad features Biden in front of a dark curtain, talking into the camera.
"Being president is not the same thing as running for president," he says. "When this campaign is over, political slogans like experience and change will mean absolutely nothing. The next president has to act. The Biden plan to end the war in Iraq has already won bipartisan support. When Pakistan erupted in crisis, I spoke to Musharraf before Bush did. You don't have to guess what I'll do as president. Just look at what I've done."
We have previously explored
Biden's claims about his Iraq plan,
so here we will focus on his statement that when Pakistan erupted, he spoke with President Pervez Musharraf before Bush did.
Indeed, Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spoke with Musharraf on Nov. 6, according to a statement from his office that day and wide news coverage of contacts with Musharraf.
In the statement, Biden described it as "a very frank and detailed discussion. I told President Musharraf how critical it is for relations between our two countries that elections go forward as planned in January, that he follow through on his commitment to take off his uniform and that he restore the rule of law to Pakistan."
President Bush spoke with Musharraf on Nov. 7, one day after Biden did. At a press availability that day at Mount Vernon, Bush's remarks were very similar to Biden's the day before. "My message was that we believe strongly in elections, and that you ought to have elections soon, and you need to take off your uniform," Bush said. "You can't be the president and the head of the military at the same time. So I had a very frank discussion with him."
It's not clear why Bush didn't speak with Musharraf until after Biden, but the records indicate that Biden's claim is True.
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During an Oct. 9, 2007, debate, Tom Tancredo pressed to change immigration policy by making a dollars and cents argument. Tancredo said an average household with an undocumented worker costs the country more than it pays in taxes.
PolitiFact found nothing to disprove Tancredo's statistics, but no one who could verify them — including his campaign.
Asked where the statistics originated, Tancredo spokesman Alan Moore referred to the Center for Immigration Studies. Bryan Griffith, a center spokesman, said officials there know of no CIS report with those numbers.
However, Griffith pointed to a 2004 report that showed families with undocumented immigrants contributed $4,200 on average to the federal government, but cost Uncle Sam $6,950.
That's a long way from the $20,000 in costs and $10,000 in taxes line that Tancredo used. Pressed for more specifics, Tancredo's campaign at first asked for details on the very study it was citing. Weeks later, spokesman Moore pointed to another report.
In a 2007 study, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, found that families with low-skilled immigrants cost taxpayers about $30,130 in 2004. Those households paid about $10,573 in taxes for 2004.
But that study includes all low-skilled, immigrant households in America, representing 15.9-million people. About 60 percent were entirely legal households, and 40 percent had undocumented workers. Tancredo's statement is about undocumented workers only, so this study is off point.
We found no other recent studies on the overall costs and benefits linked to families of undocumented workers. Moreover, critics point to flaws in the studies showing larger costs than contributions by undocumented workers.
Tim Vettel of the American Immigration Law Foundation said he was uncertain where Tancredo's statistics originated but lumped them with other reports that the foundation, which promotes immigration, has criticized.
Focusing more broadly on all immigration, the American Immigration Law Foundation said in November 2007 that most studies rely on one-year "snapshots" of the immigrant population without taking into account rising income and future tax contributions. The foundation also said the studies fail to count economic contributions such as consumer purchasing power.
The Congressional Research Service reached the same conclusion after reviewing studies in 2005.
Its report said information that typically is the basis for cost estimates is not collected, producing estimates based on assumptions and disagreement about accuracy. In the case of illegal immigration, analysts tend to disagree on how many government benefits undocumented workers actually use.
"It is very difficult to enumerate a population which is trying to avoid detection by the government," analyst Alison Siskin wrote.
Given the lack of information, and dispute over reports we did find, we rule Tancredo's statement 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.
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While Romney never said he was "to the left of Teddy Kennedy on gay rights," Romney did reach out to gay and lesbian voters during his failed 1994 bid for Kennedy's Senate seat. More to the point, Romney said he could outperform Kennedy on gay and lesbian issues.
In an October 1994 letter to the Massachusetts chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, a GOP gay rights group, Romney wrote, "For some voters it might be enough for me to simply match my opponent's record in this area. But I believe we can and must do better."
And during an August 1994 question and answer session with the Boston gay and lesbian newspaper
Bay Windows,
Romney said he could be a more effective advocate for gay rights than Kennedy because he is a Republican. "When Ted Kennedy speaks on gay rights, he's seen as an extremist. When Mitt Romney speaks on gay rights he's seen as a centrist and a moderate," he said.
By 2002, when Romney defeated Democrat Shannon O'Brien to become Massachusetts' governor, he had backed off his support of gay rights. O'Brien said she would support legislation to legalize gay marriage, while Romney said he would not. After Romney won the election, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2004 that gays and lesbians must be allowed to marry in Massachusetts, making it the first state to confer that right. Romney fought it every step of the way.
While he didn't say that he would "be to the left of Teddy Kennedy on gay rights," he did say he would be a more effective gay rights advocate than Kennedy because of his centrist/moderate stance. So apart from the license he takes with Romney's wording, Giuliani's attack is Mostly True and demonstrates just how far Romney has shifted to the right since his first foray into politics in 1994.
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Among GOP primary voters, the name Ronald Reagan is sacred. So, it's not surprising that each Republican candidate for president has done his best to claim Reagan's mantle and position himself as heir to his legacy.
Rudy Giuliani, the only GOP candidate who says he supports abortion rights, might have the hardest time making that sale, since Reagan's legacy is so wrapped up in his socially conservative views. Even so, Giuliani has made much of the past statements of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who has admitted he did not always support the Gipper.
The Romney admission in question, like much else Romney has tried to bury in his past, came in a 1994 Senate debate when Romney faced Edward Kennedy. The topic was economics. Kennedy said: "And under your economic program, under the program of Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush, we saw the growth in terms of the unemployment, the growth in the number of children living in poverty, the growth in terms of those children out of wedlock."
Romney responded: "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."
Romney has since gone out of his way to distance himself from such remarks, repeatedly referencing Reagan in glowing terms on the campaign trail this year and acknowledging his own conversion to social conservatism on hot-button issues like abortion and gay rights.
"Now, I wasn't always a Ronald Reagan conservative," Romney told a meeting of conservative activists in January. "Neither was Ronald Reagan, by the way."
We find Giuliani correctly characterizes his rival's past statements and find the claim to be True.
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During an overseas trip to Afghanistan, Sen. Barack Obama said the United States needed to focus on the war there, calling the situation "precarious and urgent," adding "I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism."
"For at least a year now, I have called for two additional brigades, perhaps three," he said.
We consulted the record to see if Obama had urged more troops for Afghanistan that long.
Back on Aug. 1, 2007, Obama gave a major foreign policy speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
The speech got a lot of attention because Obama said that the United States should aggressively pursue terrorists hiding in the mountains of Pakistan. "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said. (See our previous Truth-O-Meter rulings about Obama's stance on Pakistan
here
,
here
and
here.
)
But Obama also talked about the need for the United States to turn its attention to Afghanistan.
"Our troops have fought valiantly there, but Iraq has deprived them of the support they need — and deserve," Obama said. "As a result, parts of Afghanistan are falling into the hands of the Taliban, and a mix of terrorism, drugs, and corruption threatens to overwhelm the country. As president, I would deploy at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan to re-enforce our counterterrorism operations and support NATO's efforts against the Taliban."
That speech was the first time we could find of Obama specifically advocating for more brigades to Afghanistan. Technically speaking, the time from his speech on Aug. 1, 2007, to his more recent statement is 10 days short of a year. But it's pretty darn close, and it's likely that speech reflected policy crafted over a longer period than 10 days. So we find his statement True.
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An ad for Sen. John McCain makes the case that Sen. Barack Obama is a foreign policy lightweight who has voted against funding for troops.
"Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan," an announcer states. "He hasn't been to Iraq in years. He voted against funding our troops — positions that helped him win his nomination. Now Obama is changing to help himself become president. John McCain has always supported our troops and the surge that's working."
See our story for details
about the ad's other claims. Here we'll look at the statement that Obama "hasn't been to Iraq in years."
The McCain campaign released this ad on Friday, July 18, 2008, a day before Obama was to leave for a widely anticipated trip to Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel. Before that, the last time Obama had been in Iraq was in January 2006. McCain, on the other hand, has been to Iraq eight times as of this writing. The McCain-Obama Iraq tally is now 8 to 2.
One catch to this claim is that it was accurate when the ad was released on Friday, but was no longer accurate by Monday, July 21. Because the campaign knew its claim was going to be invalidated in a few days, we deduct one point and call it Mostly True.
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An attack ad from Barack Obama looks at a trip John McCain made to Bermuda last year.
"Bermuda. It’s more than just a vacation destination for John McCain," the ad says over jaunty, Caribbean-style steel drum music. "McCain went to Bermuda, and while he was there pledged to protect tax breaks for American corporations that hide their profits offshore. And grateful insurance company executives and their lobbyists who benefit from the tax scheme gave McCain $50,000."
Bermuda, a British territory with significant autonomy, is home to many international companies seeking to avoid taxes. In 2006, there were 14,267 international companies registered in Bermuda, many of them American-owned, according to the U.S. State Department. A 2004 GAO report also listed Bermuda as a tax haven.
McCain visited Bermuda in August 2007, when he was still competing for the Republican nomination. The only account we could find about the trip appeared in a Bermuda newspaper called the
Royal Gazette
. The Obama ad shows a copy of the newspaper while it makes its claim that McCain pledged to protect overseas tax breaks for American companies.
You can read the entire
Royal Gazette
report online; here's the part where McCain talks about tax laws:
"The Arizona senator, who spent three days on the island this week meeting business and political leaders, said he understood the concerns of the insurance and reinsurance sectors about draft legislation proposing a clampdown on U.S. business operations in so-called tax havens. He told the Royal Gazette: 'The industry, the reinsurance that's had such phenomenal success has been good for both nations. I would oppose any measures that would upset that.'"
The McCain campaign responded to the Obama ad by pointing out that the Obama campaign rents office space from Accenture, which is based in Bermuda. The
Chicago Sun-Times
reported in 2007 that the Obama campaign was leasing the 11th floor of an office tower for its headquarters from Accenture. The company is based in Bermuda.
Insurance and reinsurance companies in Bermuda are a high-profile issue, with U.S.-based insurance companies seeking to reverse a treaty with Bermuda that they say puts them at a disadvantage compared with their Bermuda-based competitors.
The Obama campaign phrases McCain's comments in a negative light, but gets the substance largely correct. McCain said he would oppose attempts to change current law in regards to Bermuda, though he singled out the insurance and reinsurance industries for protection rather than all types of industries. We rate Obama's statement Mostly True.
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An attack ad from Barack Obama looks at a trip John McCain made to Bermuda last year.
"Bermuda. It’s more than just a vacation destination for John McCain," the ad says over jaunty, Caribbean-style steel drum music. "McCain went to Bermuda, and while he was there pledged to protect tax breaks for American corporations that hide their profits offshore. And grateful insurance company executives and their lobbyists who benefit from the tax scheme gave McCain $50,000."
We looked in detail at
McCain's visit in this statement
. Here we'll look at the campaign contributions angle.
Bermuda, a British territory with significant autonomy, is home to many international companies seeking to avoid taxes. In 2006, there were 14,267 international companies registered in Bermuda, many of them American owned, according to the U.S. State Department. A 2004 GAO report also listed Bermuda as a tax haven.
To come up with its $50,000 number, the Obama campaign compiled a list of 30 people and one political action committee connected to insurance and reinsurance companies based in Bermuda. We obtained a copy of the list from the campaign and cross-checked with Federal Election Commission records and found it to be accurate.
It seems likely that the Obama campaign's numbers undercounted contributions from lobbyists connected to Bermuda-based insurance companies. We were able to independently document another $8,150 in contributions to McCain.
And finally, among the Bermuda-connected contributors, we found four donors also gave a combined total of $8,200 to Obama.
The timeline seems to be that McCain visited Bermuda in August 2007, a fundraiser for him was held in October (which he did not attend) and contributions were reported to the Federal Election Commission in November 2007 and afterward.
The ad stops short of saying there was a quid pro quo at work, though we get the feeling the Obama campaign wouldn't mind if you assumed there was. A story in the
Royal Gazette's
sister newspaper
Mid Ocean News
noted that McCain's 2007 comments were at odds with comments he made in 2002 deploring companies moving overseas. McCain said then, "More and more U.S. companies are using this highly profitable accounting scheme that allows a company to move its legal residence to offshore tax havens such as Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax, and shield its profits from taxes. I applaud efforts to discourage this practice."
The McCain campaign responded to the Obama ad by pointing out that the Obama campaign rents office space from Accenture, which is based in Bermuda. The
Chicago Sun-Times
reported in 2007 that the Obama campaign was leasing the 11th floor of an office tower for its headquarters from Accenture. The company is based in Bermuda.
The ad states that McCain got $50,000 from people connected to Bermuda-based companies, and we find this accurately portrays the contributions received. We rate Obama's statement True.
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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.
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Sen. John McCain has a well-deserved reputation in Washington as a pork-buster. The GOP presidential nominee regularly castigates colleagues when they insert language in spending bills forcing taxpayers everywhere to pay for projects only of interest to a select few.
But we sure wish that McCain would stop claiming, as he has repeatedly throughout the campaign, that he has never sought any pork for his own state. The latest instance is in a speech he made in Tampa, Fla., on Sept. 16, 2008. He said:
"I have never asked for a single earmark, pork barrel project for my state of Arizona. Sen. Obama has asked for $932-million dollars in earmarks, literally $1-million for every day that he's been in Congress." We examined the claim he's making about Barack Obama's record in another item
here.
In this one, we'll look at what McCain is boasting about himself. It echoes a point McCain made in a mailer being distributed in Florida in which McCain claims to have "never sought a single dollar" in pork barrel funding.
It's just not true. As PolitiFact writer John Frank pointed out earlier this year, McCain in 2006 co-sponsored legislation that asked for $10-million for an academic center at the University of Arizona to honor the late Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist. In 2003, Frank noted, McCain won authorization to buy property to create a buffer zone around Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, and in 1992, McCain asked the Environmental Protection Agency to provide $5-million toward a wastewater project in Nogales, Ariz.
While McCain would surely say these projects don't meet the definition of pork barrel spending, watchdogs disagree. "If it doesn't meet the technical term of earmark, it would probably meet the public idea of one," Pete Sepp, a vice president at the conservative, anti-pork National Taxpayers Union, told the
New York Times
in reference to the Rehnquist center request.
By most senators' standards, McCain's pork barrel requests are minuscule, but they do exist. And given the absolutism in McCain's claim, we rule his statement False.
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John McCain has tried to bolster his reformist credentials throughout the campaign by reminding voters that he has long been a crusader against pork barrel spending – federal money for parochial projects in particular states. At the same time, he's derided Democratic nominee Barack Obama for taking no similar stand.
McCain contends that pork spending, which is typically earmarked quietly into massive federal spending bills, forces costs onto every taxpayer that should be borne only by the people who benefit from the projects.
The latest broadside by McCain against Obama came in a speech at a rally in Tampa, Fla., on Sept. 16, 2008.
“I have never asked for a single earmark, pork barrel project for my state of Arizona. Sen. Obama has asked for $932-million dollars in earmarks, literally $1-million for every day that he’s been in Congress.”
We've examined the first part of that sentence, about McCain's own record on pork requests,
here.
In this item, we'll focus on what he says about Obama, which is nearly identical to what McCain said in a mailer to Florida voters that has been circulating for more than a week.
The mailer says, "Obama has requested $1-million in pork barrel spending for every working day he has been in the Senate."
Obama, on his Web site, has listed every earmark he's requested – but not necessarily received – during that time. It totals $931.3-million, even though the Illinois senator earlier this year said he would eschew any pork for fiscal 2009. The key phrase in McCain's mailer, "for every working day" is missing from the remarks McCain made in his Tampa speech. Obama was elected in 2004 and took office January 3, 2005. Since then, there have been about 930 working days, as they are defined by most people, Monday through Friday, excluding holidays, which would mean McCain is on solid ground in the mailer.
Technically, Obama's been "in Congress" for more than 1,350 days, if you count weekends. So how many points do you take off for McCain not saying "every
working
day"? Not many. We say this claim is Mostly True.
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An ad for Sen. John McCain makes the case that Sen. Barack Obama is a foreign policy lightweight who has voted against funding for troops.
"Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan," an announcer states. "He hasn't been to Iraq in years. He voted against funding our troops — positions that helped him win his nomination. Now Obama is changing to help himself become president. John McCain has always supported our troops and the surge that's working."
See our story for details
about the ad's other claims. Here we'll look at Obama's votes on troop funding.
The McCain campaign supported its claim that Obama voted against troop funding by citing a May 2007 Senate vote. The campaign is correct that Obama voted against a bill to fund troops, which passed anyway.
Obama's vote came after Democrats had sought unsuccessfully to attach a timetable for withdrawing troops. After that language was removed, Obama and several other senators decided to vote against the measure, saying they could not rubber-stamp an open-ended occupation. (See our
previous coverage of this issue
.)
"This country is united in our support for our troops, but we also owe them a plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else's civil war," Obama said at the time. "Gov. (Mitt) Romney and Sen. McCain clearly believe the course we are on in Iraq is working, but I do not."
The vote came when the primary contest for both the Democratic and Republican nominations was wide open, seven months before the first primaries. Obama and fellow candidates Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton voted against the bill; Republicans at the time said the vote showed the three failed to support the troops.
Clinton, then the Democratic front-runner, was asked whether the vote would prove troubling later, an idea she dismissed.
In 2008, Obama voted for a troop funding bill that passed overwhelmingly, 92-6. McCain was absent.
Obama's campaign responded to the attack by pointing to Obama's support for bills that would increase benefits to veterans. McCain opposed the bills because he believed the new benefits would encourage active military to
leave the service prematurely.
The McCain campaign is correct that Obama voted against the 2007 funding measure. But the ad's statement — "he voted against funding our troops" — is phrased with no qualifications or caveats. Actually, Obama has voted for troop funding several times in other measures. So we find the claim in the McCain ad to be Half True.
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Sen. John McCain isn't used to criticism about his support for veterans. After all, he spent five years in a Vietnamese prison camp and has staked his presidential campaign on a pledge to carry on the Iraq war.
But of late, McCain has taken heat from antiwar veterans groups such as VoteVets.org for hedging his support for legislation to expand federal funding to help veterans go to college and then for failing to show up for the Senate vote on a supplemental war spending bill that secured passage of the expanded GI Bill benefits last month.
So when a man confronted McCain during a July 7, 2008, town hall meeting — accusing the Arizona senator of speaking out against the GI bill — McCain got testy.
McCain responded that he hadn't opposed the enhanced educational benefits in the GI bill but wanted to ensure that they didn't stand in the way of the military securing re-enlistments. He said he and his allies successfully lobbied the bill's chief sponsor, Jim Webb of Virginia, to include a provision allowing a soldier who wanted to continue his military service to give his educational benefits to a family member.
All that was true. But then McCain took it too far.
"The reason why I have a perfect voting record from organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion and all the other veterans service organizations is because of my support of them," he said.
To be sure, the VFW and the Legion have given McCain awards in the past and can be fairly described as McCain supporters. The VFW's political action committee has endorsed him for re-election to his Senate seat and to his House seat before that, but neither group keeps a voting scorecard.
At the same time, another veterans service organization cited by the McCain critic at the town hall meeting — the Disabled American Veterans — gave McCain only a 20 percent grade in its 2007 voting scorecard. McCain voted for only one of the amendments that the group tallied as key votes, while voting against the other four.
Likewise, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a relatively new group that was instrumental in pushing for the expanded GI Bill, says McCain only voted veterans' way on 58 percent of the 155 Senate votes it tallied between 2001 and 2006. Even the Vietnam Veterans of America reports that McCain has voted against 15 of 31 priority bills it tracked between 2001 and 2008.
As a result, we find McCain's claim to be False.
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During a campaign speech in Green Bay, Wis., John McCain called for reforms on Wall Street oversight and blasted his Democratic opponent Barack Obama.
Among his prime targets: the mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
"While Fannie and Freddie were working to keep Congress away from their house of cards, Senator Obama was taking their money," McCain said. "He got more, in fact, than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them. And while Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent's trust to the point that Senator Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search."
It's true that Obama selected Jim Johnson, the chaiman and CEO of Fannie Mae from 1991 to 1998, to advise him on his vice presidential choice. But Johnson resigned the unpaid position on June 11, 2008, months before veep nominee Joe Biden was chosen, amid criticism of compensation and favorable mortgage terms Johnson received.
Here we'll look at McCain's statement that Obama received the second-most campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.
The source for this data is the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which has compiled a list of which political leaders received the most money from employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama's campaign cites this source to back up its claim that John McCain has received
more than $2-million from big oil
.
On the Freddie and Fannie question, it as McCain said: Obama is No. 2 on the list, with $126,349, right after Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who had $165,400.
But the list requires a few notes of explanation.
Corporations cannot give to candidates, so the center's list adds up contributions from Fannie and Freddie employees and their families. Obama has received a lot of money during his presidential campaign, though, and Fannie and Freddie don't make his list of top 20 companies. (The top three companies with employees donating to Obama are Goldman Sachs, University of California, and Citigroup, according to the center.)
The
New York Times
looked at contributions from Fannie and Freddie's boards of directors and lobbyists, who are technically not employees. That analysis found Fannie and Freddie-related contributors gave $169,000 to John McCain and his related committees, compared with $16,000 to Obama and his related committees.
Nevertheless, the center's information does reflect which candidates are getting the most money from Fannie and Freddie employees. There are other ways to parse the campaign finance numbers, but McCain is correct when he says Obama got the second-most money on a list compiled by a respected, nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog. He would have been more accurate if he would have noted that he was talking about Fannie and Freddie employees. We rate his statement Mostly True.
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A new book —
The Obama Nation
by Jerome R. Corsi — attacks Barack Obama as a political extremist. Taken as a whole, the book's primary argument is that Obama is a likely communist sympathizer with ties to Islam who has skillfully hidden his true agenda as he ruthlessly pursues elected office.
We found factual problems with Corsi's book and question its overall tone;
read our extended story here.
One of Corsi's attacks on Obama is that Obama advocates nuclear disarmament (
a statement we checked previously
and rated False) and that he wants to reduce the size of the military.
Here, we'll check whether Obama "pledged to reduce the size of the military" as Corsi charges.
We consulted Obama's proposals on defense that are detailed on his campaign Web site. "Barack Obama supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marines by 27,000 troops," says the plan. "Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families."
The policy also discusses building up "special operations forces, civil affairs, information operations, and other units and capabilities that remain in chronic short supply."
Corsi says Obama has promised to reduce the size of the military, but he seems to be drawing that assumption from Obama's criticism of the Iraq war and Obama's promises to bring more transparency and rigor to the defense contracting process. Obama's written policy proposals say Obama intends to increase the size of the military. We find Corsi's statement False.
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Sen. John McCain, trying to make a case at a church forum that Americans should feel protective of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, cited its significance in Christian history.
"I am very saddened here to be with you and talk about Russian re-emergence in the centuries-old ambition of the Russian Empire to dominate that part of the world," McCain told the Rev. Rick Warren at Saddleback Valley Community Church in California on Aug. 16, 2008. "Killings, murder, villages are being burned, people are being wantonly ejected from their homes. The latest figures from human rights organizations — 118,000 people in that small country. It was one of the earliest Christian nations. The king of then-Georgia in the third century converted to Christianity."
McCain characterized Georgia similarly on other occasions.
"Georgia is an ancient country, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion," McCain said in a campaign statement on Aug. 11, 2008.
It is true that what is now Eastern Georgia, then known as Kartli, adopted Christianity quite early.
St. Nino
, the Apostle of Georgia, introduced Christianity to the country in the 300s, converting King Marian III in 314, according to Ronald Suny, a professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of the 1988 book
The Making of the Georgian Nation.
"When the king converted he forced everyone else to become Christian," Suny said. "That's the year before the Roman Empire became Christian."
So yes, Georgia was indeed an early adopter of Christianity. Note, however, this did not happen in the third century as McCain said. The first century lasted through the year 100, the second through 200, and the third through 300. Georgia became a Christian state in 314, which was the fourth century.
Also, scholars quibble with McCain's use of the word "nation." In common parlance and under some dictionary definitions, a nation can be any territorial division. But a more subtle understanding is a group of people who believe they are entitled to some form of political representation, and thus give authority and legitimacy to a government. This concept arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to that, there were empires, dynastic states, theocracies, kingdoms and so forth, but not nations.
"To claim that whatever entity 'Georgia' may have been in the third century was a 'nation' is factually anachronistic," John Pilch, a professor of biblical literature at Georgetown University told us in an e-mail exchange. (Furthermore, he said, the word "Christian" was not fashionable at the time of the Georgian king's conversion — Christians at that time might have referred to themselves as "followers of the Way.")
These are quibbles though. A fair reading of the thrust of McCain's claim is that the place we call Georgia was an early adopter of Christianity, and that's true. He didn't use the word "nation" perfectly and he flubbed his centuries, but his claim is still Mostly True.
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John McCain may not know much about culture, but he knows ABBA.
At a town hall at the Aspen Institute on Aug. 14, 2008, McCain conceded that he didn't know a lot about art and music.
New York Times
reporter Katharine Seelye wrote that McCain said if he's "lacking in anything," it is an appreciation for music and art and "the other great things in life," partly because he spent 5 years as a prisoner of war. But then the 71-year-old senator launched into a defense of the Swedish pop band ABBA.
"Everybody says, 'I hate ABBA, Oh, ABBA, how terrible, blah, blah, blah.' How come everybody goes to
Mamma Mia!
?" McCain said. "Everybody goes! They've been selling out for years."
We wondered if McCain was right that
Mamma Mia!,
the musical based on ABBA's recordings, has been "selling out for years."
First, we will assume that McCain was referring to the stage version, which has been playing on Broadway since 2001, not the movie version, which opened this summer.
The Broadway show's Web site says the stage production, which has been performed in eight languages, has been seen by more than 30-million people in over 170 cities. The Web site calls it "the ultimate feel-good show."
And McCain seems to be keeping up with Broadway box office receipts. TicketNews, which tracks Broadway receipts, reports that
Mamma Mia!
is still selling out. For example, it sold out its performances the weeks ending Aug. 3 and Aug. 10, selling about 101 percent of its seats (the number exceeds 100 because it includes standing-room tickets). A survey of other weeks in the past year found the show nearly sold out or exceeded capacity.
Alfred Branch Jr., news editor of TicketNews, told us that the show is "a virtual sellout most nights."
So McCain is right that
Mamma Mia
has been selling out for years. This claim is True.
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New political ads from Sen. John McCain accuse Sen. Barack Obama of raising taxes on the middle class.
"He promises more taxes on small business, seniors, your life savings, your family," according to a television ad.
The ad bases its claim on the fact that Obama wants to roll back the Bush tax cuts on the upper-income brackets. So the claim is true if you happen to be a small business, a senior or a family making more than $250,000 a year, or $200,000 for a single person. Otherwise, it's generally not the case. In fact, Obama advocates eliminating income taxes for seniors with incomes less than $50,000.
An important note about seniors: Some seniors will be affected indirectly by Obama's plan to raise corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are expected to depress profits from stocks and dividends, which seniors tend to rely on for retirement income. An analysis from the Tax Policy Center concluded that about a third of seniors would see higher taxes, either because they have high incomes or because of slight increases due to the indirect effect of the corporate tax rate. Overall, seniors would see their federal tax rate go up about 2.5 percent, and that includes steep increases to the top brackets.
The "life savings" statement, according to the McCain campaign, applies to Obama's plan to raise taxes on dividends and capital gains. Increases to dividends and capital gains taxes will affect people in upper income brackets who have investments in the stock market or mutual funds. But those taxes do not apply to tax-deferred investments like 401(k)s, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and some tax-deferred college savings plans. (We've checked a similar statement previously and
found it False
.)
Capital gains and dividends taxes would stay the same for people in income brackets of $250,000 or less, according to the Obama plan. Those higher incomes constitute a small percentage of U.S. taxpayers, mostly the top 1 percent.
The ad says that Obama "promises more taxes on small business, seniors, your life savings, your family." That sounds like a broad-brush statement of Obama's taxation philosophy. But Obama does not promise those things; in fact, he promises more taxes for taxpayers with the highest incomes. McCain's statement is a distortion of Obama's proposals, and we find it 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.
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With Mike Huckabee surging in the polls in Iowa, Mitt Romney recently released an attack ad that turned on the issue of immigration. Among other things, the ad says that Mike Huckabee "even supported taxpayer-funded scholarships for illegal aliens."
There's some truth here, but it's not as dramatic as the 30-second ad portrays.
Rather than supporting a scholarship fund aimed at illegal aliens, Huckabee supported a measure that would have allowed the children of illegal aliens who graduated from Arkansas high schools to receive in-state tuition and apply for a state-funded scholarship program, the Academic Challenge Scholarship. Arkansas students can qualify for the scholarship if they achieve a specific grade-point average (3.0 out of 4.0 for a four-year college) and meet a few other basic criteria.
At a November 2007 debate in St. Petersburg, Huckabee said he supported the measure so that the children of illegal immigrants could have "the same scholarship that their peers had, who had also gone to high school with them and sat in the same classrooms."
(Huckabee also claimed the rules regarding this proposal were stricter than they actually were; we checked that claim
here
. We also checked previous claims from Romney on similar issues
here
and
here
.)
Even though Huckabee supported the measure in 2005, it never made it out of the Arkansas legislature, so it never became a law in Arkansas.
Romney is right in his assertion, but he glosses over a few important caveats to get there. For that reason, we rate this claim Mostly True.
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There are several pieces to this, so we'll take them one at a time.
First, Massachusetts: As governor, Mitt Romney oversaw a major rewrite of the state's health care program in 2006 that featured a mandate on individuals. Everyone in the state must enroll in a plan or face tax penalties. It's true that Romney vetoed the teeth behind part of the mandate — a charge to companies that didn't offer coverage to employees — which was later overridden by the state Legislature.
So, Giuliani is correct that Romney enacted a "mandate" plan, though Romney has sought to avoid that term. Giuliani also is correct that the program in Massachusetts shares some things with the health care proposal put forward by Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Both expand upon the current private-public system. Neither forces changes for those who like their current employer-provided insurance. Both aim to provide coverage for all, with subsidized private plans. And both mandate coverage by penalizing those who can afford to buy a plan but don't.
Now, does that mean the Massachusetts program is "HillaryCare"? We'll take a pass on judging that one.
Giuliani's other point is that Romney isn't proposing a national plan similar to what he did in Massachusetts. That's true, too. Romney has argued that population demographics vary so much by state that a universal plan can't be applied across the country.
Instead, he has proposed changing the way federal dollars are made available to states — which is what Massachusetts was able to do — so states are free to draw up plans that suit themselves.
Add it all up and Giuliani's got it right.
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The campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton recently trotted out quotes from Sen. Barack Obama's kindergarten teacher to prove that he's been aiming for the White House longer than he admits. Seriously.
The conflict between the top Democrats running for president began when Obama said this: "I have not been planning to run for president for however number of years some of the other candidates have been planning for."
The Clinton campaign responded with a thoroughly researched news release that culled details from Obama's life that had been reported in feature articles about him.
"Senator Obama's relatives and friends say he has been talking about running for president for at least the last 15 years," the Clinton news release said. "So who's not telling the truth, them or him?"
The evidence:
• Former classmates who said that when he was at Harvard Law School, Obama was "thinking about politics."
• A brother-in-law saying Obama told him in the early 1990s that he was interested in a run for president.
• An essay Obama wrote in third grade called, "I want to be a president."
• An essay he wrote in kindergarten called, "I Want To Become President."
PolitiFact set out to confirm those sources.
Brad Berenson, a classmate and friend of Obama's at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s, said: "I certainly never heard him say directly or indirectly that he wanted to be president of the United States. That kind of sentiment would have been absurdly presumptuous at that point."
Now, Obama spent some of his early years in Indonesia, including kindergarten and third grade. We started to track down those teachers living on the other side of the world, but then we realized this goose chase wasn't worth the effort. The Obama campaign is not denying the accuracy of the Clinton reports.
Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist, says there's no doubt the Clinton campaign has some facts on its side.
"The overall thematic attack that he is out there saying that he is somehow different from someone else in the field, that he is somehow propelled into this race … I think that's absolutely fair game for the Clinton camp to go after," said Dunn, a Democratic strategist not aligned with a candidate, but who worked as a consultant to Obama's Hopefund PAC for six months in 2006. "On the other hand, were they wise in the example they used?"
It does appear that Obama expressed ambition for the office of president many years ago. We wish we had a ruling category called "True, but ridiculous." We don't, so we're left with True.
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On several occasions, Mitt Romney has criticized former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for supporting a bill that would have allowed illegal immigrants who graduated from Arkansas high schools to be eligible for in-state tuition rates at state schools.
Romney, on the other hand, has said repeatedly that he opposed a similar measure when he was governor of Massachusetts. He does so in a television ad. That claim is accurate.
Romney vetoed a bill in 2004 that would have allowed illegal immigrants who graduated from Massachusetts high schools to pay in-state tuition at state-run colleges and universities.
"I hate the idea of in any way making it more difficult for kids, even those who are illegal aliens, to afford college in our state," Romney said at the time. "But equally, perhaps a little more than equally, I do not want to create an incentive to do something which is illegal."
In 2006, the Massachusetts legislature tried to pass the measure again in order to override his veto, but was unsuccessful.
The Truth-O-Meter says Romney's statement is True.
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Mitt Romney said a proposed law that Mike Huckabee supported when he was governor of Arkansas would have given "a tuition break to the children of illegals that are here illegally when citizens are having to pay a higher rate." There's no disputing Huckabee's position on the measure, but is that an accurate way to characterize it?
Because they aren't citizens, the children of illegal immigrants are not eligible for in-state tuition rates for state schools, which tend to be significantly lower than the rates charged to out-of-state students. The proposed Arkansas law, similar to laws on the books in other states, would have allowed some illegal immigrants who came to this country as children to receive the same tuition as their classmates. Ten states have passed similar laws, which typically include having students sign statements saying they want to resolve their immigration status.
At the Republican debate in St. Petersburg, Huckabee articulated a defense to Romney's attacks, saying the bill was intended to give resident students who were not citizens the same chances that their classmates had to attend college.
"They didn't get something better; they had to earn it," Huckabee said.
(Huckabee also exaggerated some of the regulations for the proposed law in Arkansas; we checked those claims previously here .)
Romney is right that Huckabee supported the measure. But Huckabee is right when he said the illegal immigrants in his state wouldn't have gotten a better deal than legal residents.
Romney's description of the measure as "a tuition break" would have been true only in comparison to citizens who lived outside the state of Arkansas. For Arkansas students who graduate from Arkansas high schools, the law would have given in-state students, illegal or not, the same tuition rate.
Romney may even realize this point but chose to ignore it. When he vetoed the legislation in Massachusetts in 2004, he said, "I hate the idea of in any way making it more difficult for kids, even those who are illegal aliens, to afford college in our state. But equally, perhaps a little more than equally, I do not want to create an incentive to do something which is illegal." That's some distance from his recent comments that the proposal "makes no sense to me at all."
We find his shorthand of a "tuition break" for illegal immigrants glosses over a complicated issue to the point where it's somewhat inaccurate. We find that part of his argument Half True.
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In a speech hammering the theme that Sen. John McCain would not offer much change from the last eight years under President George W. Bush, Sen. Joe Biden hit on what many consider a low point of the Bush presidency: the federal government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina.
"When George Bush said we shouldn't investigate why the government's response to Hurricane Katrina was so incompetent, John McCain stood with him," Biden said in a speech in St. Clair Shores, Mich., on Sept. 15, 2008.
It's true that McCain joined other Republicans in the Senate to fend off Democratic efforts led by Sen. Hillary Clinton to create an independent commission to examine the federal, state and local response to Hurricane Katrina.
On Sept. 14, 2005, McCain and 53 other Senate Republicans rejected an effort by Clinton to establish the commission by attaching an amendment to a spending bill. Republicans said the move violated Senate rules by attempting to legislate policy via a spending bill.
Less than five months later, on Feb. 2, 2006, McCain joined with 52 Senate Republicans in a vote to kill a Clinton effort to attach a similar amendment to a tax bill.
Both votes came down entirely along partisan lines. And they came at a time of particularly bitter recriminations over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, while the White House was refusing to release certain documents or to make senior officials available for sworn testimony before Congress, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications.
But it's misleading to suggest that McCain opposed all efforts to investigate the government's response to Katrina.
Republicans in the GOP-controlled Senate threw their support behind a probe by the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which looked into the federal role in hurricane preparedness and its response. Republican leaders expressed faith in the bipartisan investigation and derided Democratic efforts to charter an independent commission to conduct a parallel inquiry. An aide to then-Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., called amendments to establish an independent Katrina commission "taxpayer-funded flatulence that would just waste time and money to distract from the inquiry already well under way in the Senate."
And Republicans did offer to create a bipartisan congressional committee consisting of senators and representatives to examine the hurricane response. But Democrats took a pass, saying it wouldn't be truly bipartisan because as minority party they wouldn't have subpoena power.
Biden is correct that McCain did not support the Democratic plan to create an independent commission to investigate the government's response to Katrina. But McCain didn't oppose all investigation. He supported the Homeland Security investigation. It may not have been the kind of investigation the Democrats wanted. It may not have had the independence Democrats wanted. But it was an investigation. And so we rate Biden's statement Half True.
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In her first major news interview since being named the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party, Sarah Palin answered questions from journalist Charles Gibson about her thoughts on climate change.
Gibson prefaced his question by saying that Palin, before being selected for the ticket, had said global warming was not caused by human activities. That would conflict with the views of her running mate John McCain.
"Do you still believe that global warming is not man-made?" Gibson asked.
"I believe that man's activities certainly can be contributing to the issue of global warming, climate change," Palin said. "Regardless of that, John McCain and I agree that we gotta do something about it, and we have to make sure that we're doing all we can to cut down on pollution. ...
After a followup question, she said:
"I'm attributing some of man's activities to potentially causing some of the changes in the climate right now."
Gibson said he detected a change in her position, but Palin said she hadn't.
"Show me where I've ever said that there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change. I have not said that. I have said that my belief is there is a cyclical nature of our planet — warming trends, cooling trends."
We looked for Palin's previous statements on global warming.
Earlier this year, she gave an interview to the Web site Newsmax, which ran the following brief exchange with Palin.
Question: "What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?"
Palin: "A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made."
She also gave an interview to a Fairbanks newspaper in December 2007, discussing her first year as governor. The story states:
"A few months into her term, Palin directed a group of state commissioners to develop a strategy for addressing climate change. State lawmakers had already formed a climate commission, but the administration up until then had nothing.
"'I'm not an Al Gore, doom-and-gloom environmentalist blaming the changes in our climate on human activity,' Palin said Monday, 'but I'm not going to put my head in the sand and pretend there aren't changes.'"
Those are two clear statements that Palin didn't believe that human activity contributed to global warming. She agreed that global warming was real but implied that it had non-human causes. In her interview with Gibson, she said that "man's activities certainly can be contributing." We rule this one a Full Flop.
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Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was indeed an original member of the Iraq Study Group, formed at the request of Congress to conduct a bipartisan assessment of the situation in Iraq.
And he was either fired or quit from that panel after missing two official meetings.
Here's what we know.
Giuliani was appointed to the panel in March 2006, then missed two two-day meetings. On the dates of those meetings, he was paid for lucrative speaking appearances elsewhere.
On April 11-12, 2006, the first official meeting of the Iraq Study Group was held in Washington, D.C. Where was Giuliani? On April 12, he was a keynote speaker at the FT Asian Financial Centers Summit in South Korea. His net fee: $160,000.
The second official meeting of the group was May 18-19, 2006. Where was Giuliani? On May 18, he spoke at the Georgia 100 annual awards breakfast in Atlanta. His net fee: $80,000. Later that day, he attended a $100-a-plate fundraiser for former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, then a candidate for lieutenant governor of Georgia.
James Baker, secretary of state under the first President Bush, was co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, along with former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind. Baker declined to comment for this story.
But his co-chair explains how Giuliani left the group.
Hamilton says that after Giuliani told Baker he couldn't attend the second meeting in a row, "(Baker) said, 'I'm going to have to go to another person.' "
On May 31, 2006, the group announced former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III would replace Giuliani.
At the time, Giuliani said: "My previous time commitments do not permit me the full and active participation that the Iraq Study Group deserves."
It's unclear whether he was fired or forced to quit, but consider this: During his two-month tenure on the panel, between March 15, 2006, and May 24, 2006, Giuliani made 30 paid appearances for a net revenue of $2.25-million, according to his financial disclosure forms.
Pretty simple to us; McCain's attack is True.
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Under attack at a recent debate from rival Hillary Clinton on health care, Barack Obama shot back:
"Well, let's talk about health care right now because the fact of the matter is that I do provide universal health care. The only difference between Sen. Clinton's health care plan and mine is that she thinks the problem for people without health care is that nobody has mandated — forced — them to get health care."
Before jumping into this fray, it's important to note that when it comes to health care, the two Democratic presidential candidates have a lot in common.
One of the few differences is that Clinton includes a universal mandate. That means that after everything else goes according to plan, individuals will be required by law to purchase insurance. Think of how people are required to buy auto insurance and you get an idea of what that might look like.
Obama's plan includes a mandate to insure children, but it does not include a mandate for adults, as the Clinton and Edwards plans do. That likely means not as many people will be insured, said Kenneth Thorpe, professor of health policy and management at Emory University.
Obama's decision not to include a mandate is a more cautious approach, one Obama says is designed not to penalize people with modest incomes. If premiums don't drop enough after all the reforms are implemented, people will still be unable to afford insurance. If a law mandates they buy it anyway, they probably won't. Obama's argument is that if you then fine them, you're essentially punishing the poor — and they will still be uninsured. Obama is betting that his plan will get costs low enough that many of the estimated 47-million uninsured will sign up without a mandate, and a mandate will come later.
So is it fair for Obama to call his plan "universal"? Well, not really. Even if you buy his argument that his plan will create the market conditions to make health care universally available, nothing in his plan guarantees it. We rate his 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.
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A November 2007 poll has Mike Huckabee leading Republicans in Iowa, putting fear into his big-name presidential opponents. That mirrors his popularity on the Web, where he has the right to crow.
Since Nov. 17, Ron Paul has been the only candidate to get more Internet traffic than the former governor of Arkansas. Huckabee's site beat out front-runners Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani.
Huckabee gets credit for choosing his words carefully. By saying his site gets more hits than "virtually" any other candidate, he keeps it just vague enough to avoid running into trouble.
Huckabee's online fame has been growing slowly for weeks.
In September, less than 10 percent of Web users who went to presidential campaign sites checked out Huckabee's site, according to Hitwise.com, which uses a sample of 10-million Web users to track traffic to all types of Internet sites.
By mid November, visits to Huckabee's site outnumbered every other candidate but Paul, according to Hitwise. On Nov. 24, nearly 19 percent of Web visitors who went to campaign sites checked out Huckabee's site. That same week, about 26 percent visited Paul's site. Obama was third, with 10 percent.
MikeHuckabee.com features an online store, where supporters can buy T-shirts and baby bibs that read "I Like Mike." There's also a Webisode where actor Chuck Norris discusses why he endorsed Huckabee.
So, why the new popularity?
"Mike Huckabee is now being talked about as a possible winner of Iowa and people are now interested in him," said Joshua Levy, associate editor of www.techpresident.com. "The Republicans aren't that satisfied with their slate. Rudy Giuliani is a really unorthodox candidate for that base. Mitt Romney isn't really inspiring. So you got this guy, Mike Huckabee, who has been inching towards the top for a while. He is getting a lot of buzz in general."
Huckabee's success on the Web could also be attributed to voter curiosity. For the most part, Giuliani, Clinton and Obama are well-known figures whose stories have been paraded in the press for years. No need to Google them. Huckabee is not as familiar, so interested voters are going to check out his site.
"It's been a long year," said Julie Barko Germany, deputy director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University. "So fresh faces like Ron Paul and Huckabee are starting to get a little more attention."
While www.mikehuckabee.com might never share the same celebrity as www.myspace.com or www.thefacebook.com, for now Huckabee has the right to brag about his Web popularity. Given his use of the word "virtually," we give him a ruling of True.
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Sen. Barack Obama "talks a lot about stepping up and taking responsibility and taking strong positions," Sen. Hillary Clinton said during a debate in November 2007, "but when it came time to step up and decide whether or not he would support universal health care coverage, he chose not to do that. His plan would leave 15-million Americans out."
Clinton is accurately quoting studies that estimate how many will be uninsured under Obama's plan. But some experts think the plans don't offer enough detail to create a reliable estimate for such a complex issue, casting doubt on the validity of a hard number.
Obama's plan includes a mandate to insure children, but it does not include a mandate for adults, as Clinton's plan does. That likely means not as many people will be insured, said Kenneth Thorpe, professor of health policy and management at Emory University.
Clinton believes 15-million people would be left uncovered because of that lack of mandate. She based her analysis on an article written by Jonathan Cohn of the
New Republic
who quoted RAND, the Urban Institute and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.
Realistically, though, the claim is an educated guess. Given that 47-million people are uninsured now, 15-million uninsured after Obama's plan doesn't seem unreasonable, according to several experts — it would mean that Obama succeeded in covering almost 70 percent of those currently uninsured. But neither Clinton nor Obama offer hard numbers on what income levels would qualify for what programs. Given the limited data, other experts question the hard number.
It's a tough call, but because of the disagreements here, we find her claim to be based on too many hypotheticals to rate more than a Half True.
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Ron Paul, the only Republican candidate for president who opposes the war and one of the most ardent antiwar candidates in both parties, is on the money here.
The Center for Responsive Politics reports that since January, he has received at least $53,670 from U.S. military personnel. The
Houston Chronicle,
after an extensive analysis of Federal Election Commission reports, puts the figure at $63,440 for the same period.
The disparity in the figures is caused by the complicated nature of campaign contributions.
Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for CRP, speculates that the difference between their numbers and those of the
Chronicle
are because the newspaper had access to small contributions and was more familiar with the military connections of people who might not have listed the military as their employer.
Regardless, Paul is right that he's on top.
Both sources say Democratic candidate Barack Obama comes in second, with CRP reporting he has received $45,200 from military folks. The Houston paper says active and retired military personnel funneled $53,968 to Obama's campaign.
"What we were hearing from the donors is that this money was definitely a statement about the war," Ritsch said. "It doesn't mean it reflects the views of anyone else in the military. It just may be the way this small slice of people is making a statement, because it's one of the ways they can make a statement. If you're active military, there aren't too many ways you can protest the mission you've been assigned."
John McCain comes in third, with CRP reporting he received $40,000 and the
Chronicle
saying $48,208. McCain was a Vietnam War prisoner and backs the surge in Iraq.
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At the CNN/YouTube debate on Nov. 28, 2007, the Republican candidates were asked how they would tackle the national debt and control spending. CNN's Anderson Cooper called on Sen. John McCain, who said: "I have the record of fighting against wasteful spending. I have a clear record of winning. I saved the taxpayers $2-billion on a bogus Air Force Boeing tanker deal where people went to jail."
Indeed, McCain was front and center in a well-publicized effort that killed an Air Force plan to lease 100 Boeing 767s and use them for refueling tankers. The plan eventually led to one of the more notable Washington scandals in years, resulting in prison terms for Mike Sears, a top Boeing official, and Darleen Druyun, the Air Force's No. 2 weapons buyer. Druyun admitted to giving Boeing preferential treatment and negotiating a $250,000-a-year job with the company while overseeing the deal.
It is well-documented in media and government reports that McCain was quick to identify the $23.5-billion deal as a bad one for taxpayers. He found it in December 2001, tucked into a little-noticed amendment to the 2002 defense budget.
Earlier that year, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Boeing had convinced the Air Force that it could start replacing its aging fleet of refueling tankers more quickly by leasing the aircraft rather than purchasing them. Air Force officials acknowledged that leasing would be more expensive, but they said the estimated extra cost — $150-million — was worth it.
There were two problems. One, the Air Force previously expressed no great urgency to replace its tanker fleet. Two, government investigations prompted by McCain's public outrage found that the Air Force vastly underestimated the extra cost of leasing. In 2003, the Congressional Budget Office put the extra cost at $1.3-billion to $2-billion, which is where McCain gets his number.
Other senators and watchdog groups took up the fight against the deal, but only after McCain and his staff revealed the makings of a scandal. A 2005 report by the Defense Department's Inspector General found that the Air Force circumvented normal procedures, conducted no analysis of the alternatives to leasing and collected no pricing data to justify the deal.
"If it wasn't for Sen. McCain, the scrutiny that occurred about this deal would never have happened," said Keith Ashdown of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. "It was probably the best example of oversight in the 108th Congress."
Boeing paid a record $615-million to settle the civil and criminal allegations that arose in the scandal.
Since the tanker deal never went through, it's hard to say McCain saved taxpayers $2-billion. It might be more accurate to say he kept the government from entering into a deal that would have caused it to overspend by as much as $2-billion.
Despite that quibble, we find his statement True.
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James Dobson, an evangelical leader who founded the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, says he cannot support Sen. John McCain. He has gone so far as to say he will not vote for the first time in his life this November if McCain is the Republican nominee.
In a statement read by Laura Ingraham on her radio show, Dobson attacked McCain's conservative credentials, specifically his collegiality with Democrats. Dobson emphasized that the statement was his personal opinion, not that of Focus on the Family.
"I am convinced Sen. McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are," the statement reads. "He has at times sounded more like a member of the other party. McCain actually considered leaving the GOP in 2001, and approached John Kerry about being Kerry's running mate in 2004. McCain also said publicly that Hillary Clinton would make a good president. Given these and many other concerns, a spoonful of sugar does not make the medicine go down. I cannot, and I will not vote for Sen. John McCain, as a matter of conscience."
We've addressed a claim on McCain being considered as a running mate to John Kerry
here.
So we'll focus on Dobson's claim that McCain once said Sen. Clinton would make a good president.
According to a transcript of
Meet the Press,
Dobson is right.
Wrapping up a Feb. 20, 2005, appearance from Baghdad during a joint trip, the senators praised each other in a light-hearted exchange. McCain even ended the interview by acknowledging what trouble he'd gotten into.
Russert: "Senator McCain, a serious question: Do you think the lady to your right would make a good president?"
Clinton: "Oh, we can't hear you, Tim. We can't hear you."
McCain: "Yeah, you're breaking up. I am sure that Senator Clinton would make a good president. I happen to be a Republican and would support, obviously, a Republican nominee, but I have no doubt that Senator Clinton would make a good president."
Russert: "Equal time, Senator Clinton. The gentleman to your left?"
Clinton: "Absolutely."
Russert: "We may have a fusion ticket right here."
McCain: "Thanks for doing that to us. Thanks for doing that to us, Tim."
No spin in that exchange. We judge Dobson's statement to be True.
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Its presidential nominee all but announced, the Republican National Committee is ready for the next challenge: love note writing.
In a feature on its
Web site,
the RNC offers up free gifts for Valentine's Day. That is, cards from your favorite Democratic opponents.
"If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put T and AX together," coos a sweet valentine from Sen. Hillary Clinton.
"My liberal heart bleeds for you," intones Sen. Barack Obama.
Six options await the last-minute shopper — and you can send it to 10 people at once!
Many can appreciate the messages' snide sentiments, but here's the problem: While most of the Valentines are cute twists on criticisms of the two candidates, one is simply untrue.
It's a Clinton valentine that reads: "Roses are red, violets are blue, I'll raise your taxes and there is nothing you can do."
PolitiFact checked an earlier claim from the RNC that Clinton's campaign proposals would cost taxpayers more than $777.6-billion. We found that to be
Mostly True.
And Clinton has said she supports letting the Bush tax cuts of 2001 expire as scheduled in 2010 for people making more than $250,000 a year. Critics point to that as a sign she plans to raise taxes as president.
But it's the "there is nothing you can do" line that draws the Truth-O-Meter's attention.
Since when can a president raise taxes without the approval of Congress? And aren't voters encouraged to speak up about policies they oppose?
We gave a Pants on Fire ruling to former presidential candidate John Edwards when he claimed
king-like powers
for the presidency. The RNC now makes a similar claim.
Maybe the RNC should stick to the biting sarcasm of such sentiments as "On this Valentine's Day ... may higher taxes come your way!" (a Clinton card offering) or "Will you be my Valentine? Yes ... no ... present" (a shot at Obama's voting record in the Illinois state Senate).
Or consider adding fact sheets with footnotes to its Valentines. For this day, it's Pants on Fire wrong.
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As the primary race enters its final stretch, the sparring is getting more intense. Sen. Hillary Clinton unveiled an attack ad for the Wisconsin primary in which a narrator chides Sen. Barack Obama for ducking debates.
Two more debates are scheduled between the two candidates before March 4, 2008; Clinton wants more, though.
"Maybe he'd prefer to give speeches than have to answer questions," sniffs an off-screen narrator. "Like why Hillary Clinton has the only health care plan that covers every American, and the only economic plan that freezes foreclosures."
We'll confine ourselves to examining the health care claim here. Clinton is correct that her plan is the only one among the presidential candidates to require health care coverage for all Americans. John Edwards was another candidate pushing universal coverage, but with his exit from the race on Jan. 30, 2008, Clinton now stands alone.
None of the Republicans promote universal health care. Barack Obama has said he wants affordable coverage for everyone, but his plan has no mandate to require coverage.
At the most recent Democratic debate on Jan. 31, 2008, Obama said he opposed the mandate for logistical reasons. Enforcing a mandate will require some sort of penalty, such as fines, to ensure compliance, he said. "And that, I don't think, is helping those without health insurance," Obama said.
Obama has said he wants to cover every American, but experts say it's unlikely he will without a mandate as part of his plan. Earlier in the campaign, Obama said his plan did provide universal coverage, but we found that claim Barely True; read our ruling
here
.
Because Clinton does include a mandate in her plan, she is correct in saying that she is the only candidate for president with a plan that mandates health care for all Americans. We find her statement True.
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Trying to brush off some of her recent defeats, Sen. Hillary Clinton compared her battle with Sen. Barack Obama to Bill Clinton's presidential travails, noting that he, too, had a tendency to perform lousy in caucuses.
"I have something in common with my husband. He never carried caucuses either. He lost all of the ones that I've lost," she said in a Feb. 11, 2008, ABC/Politico interview.
Misery may love company, but the New York senator is stretching facts a bit to draw comparisons with the self-proclaimed "Comeback Kid." That's partly because some states have switched their selection processes between primaries, in which voters cast statewide ballots for the nominee of their choice, and the older caucus system, in which voters meet at the precinct level to decide a winner, sometimes under complicated rules.
It's true that Bill Clinton lost all the states that Hillary Clinton has lost among those states that held caucuses in both 1992 and 2008. Those are Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota and Washington. Hillary Clinton also lost primaries in Delaware and Utah — states that in 1992 held caucuses that Bill Clinton lost. And she lost the caucus in Colorado, a state whose primary Bill Clinton couldn't carry 16 years ago. On the other hand, she won the Nevada caucus that her husband lost in 1992.
The couple's fortunes also differed in several states that have changed their nominating processes. Hillary Clinton lost caucuses in Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota, which each held primaries in 1992 that Bill Clinton won. She won the primary in Arizona, a state Bill Clinton was unable to carry when it held a caucus in 1992.
As an incumbent president in 1996, Bill Clinton didn't have to sweat intraparty battles and coasted to the party nomination unopposed.
It's hard to read too much into comparisons like the one Hillary Clinton cites because the political complexions of some states — particularly in the West — have changed markedly over the past 16 years. So, too, has the nature of campaigning — and the way the 24/7 spin cycle affects groups of voters. Safe to say, both Clintons do better in big states that hold primaries. For this reason, we rule Hillary Clinton's claim Mostly True.
UPDATE:
We have updated this item to show that Nevada held a caucus this year, not a primary.
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Trying to cast Sen. Barack Obama as untested in general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton pollster Mark Penn asserted during a Feb. 11 conference call with reporters that the first-term Illinois senator has "never had a serious Republican challenger."
Critics have frequently tried to hang the "short on experience" rap on Obama, but in this instance, Penn is correct.
Obama's toughest battles at the state and national level have been in Democratic primaries. As a community organizer and civil rights lawyer on Chicago's South Side, Obama won his first political race in 1996 by successfully challenging the nominating petitions of four primary rivals in the overwhelmingly Democratic 13th Senate district. He faced no Republican opposition.
In 2000, Obama made his first run for Congress by challenging incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in a primary but got trounced, finishing with just 31 percent of the vote, compared to Rush's 61 percent.
Four years later, Obama found himself on an unexpectedly easy path to the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican Peter G. Fitzgerald. First, Republican multimillionaire front-runner Jack Ryan dropped out of the race amid allegations he pressured his wife to go to sex clubs. The GOP, desparate for a quick replacement, turned to social conservative Alan L. Keyes, who moved from Maryland to Illinois for the race.
Obama wound up capturing 70 percent of the vote, buoyed by the national exposure he received from delivering the keynote speech for presidential nominee John Kerry at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Because Obama has faced only token Republican opposition, when he's faced any at all, we deem this claim to be True.
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An ad from an independent advocacy group, BornAliveTruth.org, criticizes Barack Obama's votes on abortion when he was a state senator in Illinois.
The ad shows a young woman, Gianna Jessen, looking directly at the camera and saying the following: "Can you imagine not giving babies their basic human rights, no matter how they entered our world? My name's Gianna Jessen, born 31 years ago after a failed abortion. But if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn't be here. Four times Barack Obama voted to oppose a law to protect babies left to die after failed abortions. Senator Obama, please support born alive infant protections. I'm living proof these babies have a right to live."
View the ad here
.
The ad refers to Illinois legislation put forward in 2001, 2002 and 2003 by opponents of abortion. The intent was to require doctors to provide immediate life-saving care to any infant that survived an intended abortion. The legislation, which included multiple bills, specified that an infant surviving a planned abortion is "born alive" and "shall be fully recognized as a human person and accorded immediate protection under the law."
The bills' supporters said it gave added emphasis to laws already on the books, deterring the death of abortion survivors from neglect. One of the bills' strongest supporters was a nurse, Jill Stanek, who said she had witnessed infants left to die in dirty utility rooms. Abortion-rights proponents, on the other hand, said the legislation was a back-door attempt to stop legal abortions.
Illinois already had a law on its books from 1975 that said if a doctor suspected an abortion was scheduled for a viable fetus — meaning able to survive outside of the mother's body — then the child must receive medical care if it survives the abortion. The new laws didn't distinguish between viable and nonviable, meaning that an infant of any age that survived an abortion should receive care.
Obama did vote against the laws, by voting no or present on the bills. (In Illinois, a present vote has the same weight as a no vote.) But because of the older law, Jessen is wrong when she says "if Barack Obama had his way, I wouldn't be here." According to the medical records provided by the organization that produced the ad, Jessen was born at 29 weeks, which would have been a viable pregnancy and subject to the older Illinois law requiring that she receive medical care. So it's not correct to say that Obama opposed that.
Also, Jessen was born in California, not Illinois.
We know Jessen is speaking somewhat figuratively here, but the fact is that someone born under similar circumstances in Illinois would have been protected under the law. Obama has said he supported the existing law and felt it provided sufficient protection for abortion survivors like Jessen. We rule her statement False.
For more on the born alive controversy, please
read our extended story here.
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At the second presidential debate in Nashville, John McCain attacked Barack Obama's health care plan.
Obama's plan calls for "mandates and fines for small businesses," McCain said.
"If you're a small business person and you don't insure your employees, Senator Obama will fine you — will fine you. That's remarkable," McCain said.
But we find that when you dig into the nitty gritty of Obama's plan, that's not the case.
Obama's plan expands health care coverage for those who don't have it by a number of strategies, such as creating national pools for individuals to buy their own insurance. It increases eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. And it aims at reining in costs for everyone by streamlining medical record-keeping and emphasizing preventive care.
Obama's plan does not mandate coverage, except for children. Obama said often during the Democratic primary campaign that he did not include a mandate for adults so as not to penalize people with modest incomes. If there's a mandate on anyone to purchase health care, the mandate would be on parents, not small businesses.
Obama's plan says that employers who don't offer their employees insurance will be required to contribute to the national pool. Obama's plan exempts small businesses from contributing to the pool. The plan does not define what's a small business and what's not.
McCain calls this a "fine," but being required to contribute to a pool is not the same as paying a penalty for some wrongdoing.
So even by a generous definition, Obama does not fine "small businesses." Indeed, they are not even subject to the mandate. We rate McCain's claim False.
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In a debate in Nashville on Oct. 7, 2008, Barack Obama and John McCain tussled over tax policy.
Obama, responding to a question about fiscal responsibility, said the federal debt needs to be reduced in a way that shares the burden fairly.
"Now, when Senator McCain is proposing tax cuts that would give the average Fortune 500 CEO an additional $700,000 in tax cuts, that's not sharing a burden."
To come up with that number, the Obama campaign cites an average CEO salary of $12.8-million and a tax savings of 5.5 percent for the top earners during the year 2012 under a McCain administration. That comes to about $705,000.
The math is accurate, but the numbers require a small amount of explanation.
The $12.8-million comes from a
Forbes
magazine study of the average CEO compensation in 2007 for the 500 largest companies. Technically speaking, this would not be the Fortune 500, a listing compiled by
Fortune
magazine. An extremely minor point, but we note it to give
Forbes
its due for compiling the study.
The 5.5 percent tax savings comes from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which estimated tax impact for income brackets under the McCain plan. They created an analysis that draws on the candidates' campaign stump speeches, and found that according to those proposals, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a 5.5 percent decrease in their tax rates in 2012 under McCain's plan. That comes to $700,000.
But the center also did an analysis based on information from the candidates' economic advisers, and those policies are slightly more conservative than what the candidates say in their stump speeches. For example, the candidates will talk about a proposal as if it will begin immediately, when the advisers say it will actually be phased in. Using the more conservative analysis, CEOs would receive a tax rate decrease of 2.1 percent, or about $270,000. That's still a big number, but not quite as big as $700,000.
It's not surprising that candidates select the numbers most advantageous to their argument, but it's worth noting that there is a different way to look at this calculation that is also valid. Still, Obama is using credible numbers from independent sources to make his point. It does seem that high earners do better under John McCain's plan. We rate his statement Mostly True.
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As the U.S. and world economic systems continue to falter, both Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama claim to have seen the crisis coming to some degree, and tried to head it off.
McCain has
cited his endorsement of legislation
in 2006 that would have reined in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac somewhat. And at the second presidential debate, Obama cited a letter he wrote to federal officials "two years ago."
"Understand that the biggest problem in this whole process was the deregulation of the financial system," Obama said during the Oct. 7, 2008 debate. "Senator McCain, as recently as March, bragged about the fact that he is a deregulator. On the other hand, two years ago, I said that we've got a subprime lending crisis that has to be dealt with.
"I wrote to (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson, I wrote to Federal Reserve Chairman (Ben) Bernanke, and told them this is something we have to deal with, and nobody did anything about it."
The last sentence appeared to refer to
this letter
that Obama sent to Paulson and Bernanke on March 22, 2007.
Obama's comments in the debate suggest the letter warned about the then-looming subprime lending crisis and its potential impact on the wider economy.
So let's check the text.
"There is grave concern in low-income communities about a potential coming wave of foreclosures," he wrote. "We cannot sit on the sidelines while increasing numbers of American families face the risk of losing their homes."
He went on to suggest the two officials convene a homeownership-preservation summit where banks, investors, regulators and consumers could forge a plan to stave off foreclosures.
"Rampant foreclosures are in nobody’s interest... There is an opportunity here to bring different interests together in the best interests of American homeowners and the American economy," he wrote.
So yes, Obama characterized the letter accurately. In it, he not only called for action to head off the unraveling of the subprime mortgage market, but also warned about its impact on the nation's economy. He sent the letter about 18 months ago, a time frame for which "two years" is a fair estimate. We find his claim to be True.
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In a radio ad airing in the heart of Harley-Davidson country, Sen. Barack Obama accuses Sen. John McCain of turning his back on American-made products.
An announcer introduces McCain telling motorcycle enthusiasts in South Dakota that he prefers the roar of Harley-Davidsons to the cheers that Obama received during a recent trip to Germany.
"Not long ago, a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day," McCain said.
The announcer then states: "But when it comes to his record, American-made motorcycles like Harleys don't matter to John McCain. Back in Washington, McCain opposed a requirement that the government buy American-made motorcycles. And he said all buy-American provisions were quote 'disgraceful.' Surprised? You shouldn't be. This is the same John McCain who supported billions in tax breaks for companies who ship American jobs overseas. It's time to hear the roar of a strong American economy again, and stop John McCain from shipping our jobs overseas."
Obama's campaign is broadcasting the 60-second ad in York, Pa., in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, and in Wisconsin, where Harley-Davidson is headquartered. York is home to Harley's largest motorcycle manufacturing plant and played host to McCain the day the ad debuted.
In this item, we'll focus on whether McCain called a requirement for the federal government to buy American products "disgraceful."
Indeed he did.
McCain has repeatedly voted and spoken against requiring the government to buy American-made products. He argues that such a requirement hurts trade and doesn't guarantee the lowest prices for taxpayers.
In a 1997 article in
Defense Daily,
McCain criticized the requirement as "the worst, most disgraceful aspect of the legislative process in Washington. I can not be more strong in my views without using four letter words. It's crazy for us, because ball bearings are made in a certain state, to somehow prevent the United States Defense Department from purchasing ball bearings if they meet quality standards from our allies."
In 2005, he specifically mentioned motorcycles during Senate debate on a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security.
"Lastly, I am also disappointed that the bill once again this year contains a department-wide 'buy America' requirement, and specific language directing the Secret Service to purchase American-made motorcycles. I firmly object to all 'buy America' restrictions, as they represent gross examples of protectionist trade policy."
He added, "Furthermore, as a fiscal conservative, I want to ensure our government gets the best deal for taxpayers and with a 'buy American' restriction that cannot be guaranteed."
The McCain campaign did not respond to Obama's charge. But his past words say it all. Obama's claim is True.
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A snarky Web ad from Sen. John McCain calls Sen. Barack Obama "The One" and shows his supporters saying things like "Hot chicks dig Obama."
"We know he doesn't have much experience and isn't ready to lead, but that doesn't mean he isn't dreamy," jibes an off-screen narrator.
Of most interest to us, though, was the ad's claim of what Obama supporters — his "fan club" — will get.
"The perks are amazing, like a tax increase for everyone earning more than $42,000 a year," the narrator says, as a 1040 form from the Internal Revenue Service slides across the screen.
Text flashes by briefly, then spins around 360 degrees as it fades away, saying, "Obama voted to raise taxes on everyone making more than $42,000."
McCain has made similar statements before, saying Obama voted to raise taxes on people making more than $42,000 a year. We rated that statement
Barely True
.
The McCain campaign's evidence for its charges are Obama's votes on budget resolutions. A kind of blueprint for the federal budget, a budget resolution sets targets for committees that write legislation on taxes and spending. Obama joined Democrats on what were largely party-line votes expressing the desire to roll back the Bush tax cuts in order to fund popular programs. The resolution envisions tax cuts rescinded on people making about $42,000 and higher.
But voting for a budget resolution is quite different from voting for a tax increase. Budget resolutions are nonbinding, don't have the force of law and don't include precise details on taxes or spending. They're different from legislation that raises or lowers tax rates.
In the case of the McCain ad, we're more concerned with the voiceover that says, "The perks are amazing, like a tax increase for everyone earning more than $42,000 a year." That seems designed to make the average viewer think that Obama wants to raise taxes on people making that amount, which isn't true. Obama wants to increase taxes by rolling back the Bush tax cuts on people making more than $200,000 if single or $250,000 if married filing jointly.
What the ad implies is a major distortion that seems intent on confusing people about what Obama's policies are. When McCain's ads talked about tax-related votes, we found the statement
Barely True
. In another instance, he made claims about Democrats raising taxes by $500-million through a budget resolution, a claim we found
False
.
But the new Web ad pushes the envelope too far when the narrator says "a tax increase for everyone earning more than $42,000 a year." It's a gross distortion of Obama's proposals to say they would raise taxes on "everyone" who earns that much, and we rate McCain's claim False.
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In a Spanish-language radio ad, John McCain makes the case that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class.
Translated into English, the ad asks, "Are you ready for the higher taxes on income, savings and the sale of your home that Barack Obama promises?"
We checked out some of the ad's
other claims in a story we wrote
. Here, we'll look at the claim that Obama wants to raise taxes on home sales.
We've seen this claim before in anonymous chain e-mails that attack Obama's tax policies. We ruled those claims false.
There's only one scenario in Obama's tax plan that we can find in which taxes on home sales would go up. You would have to be a wealthy person, making more than $200,000 if you're single and $250,000 as a couple, and you would have to make a substantial profit on your home -- more than $250,000 in profit.
Here's how it would work. Obama proposes to increase the capital gains tax on upper incomes. There are exemptions to the capital gains tax, however, and one of the best-known exemptions is on home sales. In general, if you own your home and sell it for a profit, you are not taxed on the first $250,000 of profit if you are single, or on the first $500,000 of profit if you are a married couple. Neither McCain nor Obama have proposed changing this exemption.
Most home sales under Obama's plan would also be taxed at 0 percent, unless, as we explained, profits on the home sale are more than $250,000 for a single person or $500,000 for couples.
To present this detail of Obama's plan as wholesale tax increase on home sales is deceptive. Obama promises no such thing. We rule this statement 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.
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New political ads from John McCain accuse Barack Obama of raising taxes on the middle class.
"Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000," an announcer says in a television ad. "He promises more taxes on small business, seniors, your life savings, your family."
To support this statement, the McCain campaign points to two Obama votes on budget resolutions, one in March 2008 and another in June 2008.
Problem is, neither of these votes actually raised taxes, nor were they expected to.
Instead, the votes approved budget resolutions, which are blueprints for the federal budget. The resolutions set targets for the committees that write legislation on taxes and spending. Obama joined Democrats on what were largely party-line votes expressing the desire to roll back the Bush tax cuts in order to fund popular programs. The tax cuts would have been rescinded on people making about $42,000 and higher.
The McCain campaign is correct that Obama voted for the measures, which expressed approval for tax increases. But as we have pointed out in other stories, it's inaccurate to suggest votes on non-binding budget resolutions, which don't have the force of law and don't include precise details on taxes or spending, are the same as votes on legislation that sets policy. The ad gives an overall false impression that Obama as president would favor tax increases for incomes of $42,000. He does not. Obama's tax proposals are crafted so that tax increases hit those couples $250,000 or more a year, or $200,000 for singles. He also proposes a $1,000 tax credit on income for working families ($500 for singles).
Because the ad cherry-picks a vote that would not have directly changed the tax code, we find the statement 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.
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The presidential candidates argued about the economy and fiscal policy at a debate on Oct. 7, 2008, in Nashville.
Barack Obama criticized John McCain's talk of earmarks, saying that cutting earmarks would not significantly affect the federal deficit.
"Senator McCain has been talking tough about earmarks, and that's good, but earmarks account for about $18-billion of our budget," Obama said.
Fiscal conservatives concerned about the national debt — which is now more than $9-trillion in total — often mention earmarks as something that needs fixing. But earmarks are only a small part of the problem.
According to an Office of Management and Budget tally, earmarks totaled $18-billion for the 2008 budget, or roughly 10 percent of the deficit for that year. Another report found that appropriations bills in fiscal year 2008 included $16.5 billion for earmarks. Those numbers are lower than previous years because earmarking dropped considerably following the congressional lobbying scandals of 2005 and 2006. But even at their peak in 2005, when earmarks hit $52-billion, according to the Congressional Research Service and the OMB, that was only 16 percent of that year’s deficit of $318-billion.
The numbers show Obama gets his earmark number correct. We rate his statement True.
Asked during the second presidential debate whom he would consider for treasury secretary, Sen. John McCain floated the name of former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, then talked her up with an astounding statistic.
"I like Meg Whitman," McCain said during the Oct. 7, 2008, debate. "She knows what it's like to be out there in the marketplace. She knows how to create jobs. Meg Whitman was the CEO of a company that started with 12 people and is now — 1.3-million people in America make their living off eBay."
That's way off. We hate to nitpick apparent misstatements, but this one's a doozy — 1.3-million is the number of people
worldwide
who make
some
money off eBay, according to a 2006 A.C. Nielsen study.
As of 2003, some 20,000 Americans made their living off eBay, company executive Jim Griffith told a Colorado newspaper at the time.
These days, the company only keeps track of eBay entrepreneurs worldwide, and doesn't distinguish between full time and part time online auctioneers, a representative told us.
But it's not conceivable that the number of Americans making a living off eBay has climbed to 1.3-million. In 2005, the latest year for which statistics are available, just 724,000 Americans made money selling on eBay, according to a Nielsen study. But that includes many who made just a few bucks – not a living.
We examined this issue
before
, when McCain said 50,000 Americans made their living off eBay. The company told us it didn't know where he got that number, but we gave him a Half True because we couldn't be certain he was wrong.
This time, his number is more than a million higher, and not even conceivably true. McCain bought himself a False.
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During the second presidential debate, Sen. John McCain drew a distinction with President Bush on the issue of global warming.
"We have an issue that we may hand our children and our grandchildren a damaged planet," McCain said when environmental issues arose during the Oct. 7, 2008, debate. "I have disagreed strongly with the Bush administration on this issue."
He went on to say he traveled all over the world looking at the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, and introduced legislation on the subject of global warming.
But let's check the record – as we have
in the past
when McCain made similar claims on the campaign trail – and see if he was in fact at odds with Bush on global warming.
McCain spoke up about global warming in January 2003. And as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, he held hearings on the issue several years before that.
On Jan. 9, 2003, McCain and Sen. Joe Liberman introduced the Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship Act, which sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by capping them and allowing companies and utilities to sell or trade their emission rights.
When he introduced the bill, McCain called it "the first comprehensive piece of legislation" in capping emissions.
"The U.S. is responsible for 25 percent of the worldwide greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "It is time for the U.S. government to do its part to address this global problem, and legislation on mandatory reductions is the form of leadership that is required to address this global problem."
By contrast, the Bush administration has opposed cap-and-trade programs and preferred voluntary efforts on climate change.
Manik Roy, director of congressional affairs for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said McCain had actually been working on the climate change bill in 2001, but it got delayed after the 9/11 attacks. The Lieberman-McCain bill ultimately failed in October 2003 by a 43-55 vote, but Roy said it was a key step in "educating the Senate" about how government could respond to global warming.
"It is absolutely correct that McCain stood up on this issue, forced the Senate to focus on this issue when nobody else thought it made sense and did it with strong opposition from the White House," Roy said.
He called McCain "a huge leader on this issue in the Senate."
And so we find McCain's statement to be True.
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While campaigning for his wife in Maine, a reporter asked former President Bill Clinton about some of the criticism he has received on the trail.
Rob Caldwell of the local NBC affliate WCSH-TV in Portland asked Clinton, "You have been praised for your campaigning for her; you have been criticized for it. Do you have any regrets about the way you have conducted yourself on the campaign trail in the past months? Any regrets about anything you've said or done?"
Clinton began by saying, "Well, everything I have said has been factually accurate. But I think the mistake that I made is to think that I was a spouse like any other spouse who could defend his candidate. I think I can promote Hillary but not defend her because I was president."
He went on to complain that critics have mischaracterized his comments in South Carolina as personal attacks on Sen. Barack Obama.
Clinton is wrong when he says everything he said has been factually accurate. We found inaccuracies in his comments about Obama's position on Iraq. Clinton said that Obama claimed the same position on the Iraq war as George W. Bush. But that's a selective quote on comments Obama made about the need to bring a satisfactory conclusion to the Iraq invasion once it had commenced. We rated Clinton's statement Half True; read it
here
).
We also found Clinton was flat-out wrong when he slammed Obama for remarks about Ronald Reagan. Clinton criticized Obama for saying "the Republicans had all the good ideas." What Obama actually said was "I think it's fair to say the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom." Read our extended analysis on Clinton's charge
here
. We rate it False.
And it's not just us: The
Washington Post's
Factchecker
blog awarded the former president
two Pinocchios
for the same statements we looked at about Obama.
So we find Clinton's superlative — "everything I have said has been factually accurate" — to be False.
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Raising the prospect that a Hillary Clinton presidency will weaken the Democratic party nationally, a mailer sent on behalf of Barack Obama in the days before Super Tuesday spells out how many governorships and congressional seats the party lost during the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency.
"8 years of the Clintons, major losses for Democrats across the nation," the mailer read, comparing the number of Democratic governors, U.S. senators and representatives after the 1992 and 2000 elections. It shows Democrats lost 12 governorships, seven Senate and 46 House seats over that span.
Factually, the mailer's claims are borne out in breakdowns by the Senate, Clerk of the House and Congressional Quarterly, using 1993 and 2001 as the reference years.
Many of the Democratic losses came in the 1994 election cycle, when voters dealt a stunning rebuke to Clinton's first-term policies and put Republicans in control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.
But the GOP began to lose congressional seats in the 1996 and 1998 elections, while Clinton still was in office. And just months after he departed, the Senate shifted back to Democratic control after Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords switched his affiliation from Republican to Independent.
While it's true that Democrats suffered major losses in 1994, they recouped some of those seats before Clinton left office. We find the claim to be Mostly True.
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Sen. Barack Obama often speaks about how he believes he will be a stronger general election candidate than his primary opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
At a campaign stop in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 10, 2008, he brought up the negative opinions some people have of Clinton, who is well known to most voters from her time as first lady.
"I think Sen. Clinton starts off with 47 percent of the country against her. That's a hard place to start if you want to win the election," he said.
Pollsters regularly ask voters whether they rate candidates positively or negatively. Indeed, Clinton's negatives are consistently higher than Obama's, but different polls show her at different levels.
We looked at the times the
USA Today
/Gallup Poll asked voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, going back to January 2007. Her negative percentage fluctuated between 40 and 52, but the average of 21 polls came out to 47.
ABC News and the
Washington Post
have asked the question at least four times since January 2007. Her unfavorable ratings on that poll came in between 48 and 40, with an average of 44.5. CNN polled four times and found unfavorables between 39 and 44, with an average of 41.5.
Obama's unfavorable ratings tend to be well under 40 percent. In several polls, his unfavorable ratings are in the 20s.
Not every poll rates her unfavorables consistently as high as 47 percent, and poll numbers are always a little bit squishy. But, the
USA Today
/Gallup Poll has polled often on Clinton's unfavorables, and the average of 21 polls puts her negatives at 47 percent. We find that to be about as solid a poll figure as you can have, so we find Obama's statement True.
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Sen. Barack Obama took several swipes at Sen. Hillary Clinton, his rival in the race for the Democratic nomination, at a Feb. 10, 2008, campaign rally in Alexandria, Va.
In one, he used an example of something she said to illustrate his point that Americans "don't want political talk."
"I think part of what the American people are looking for right now is straight talk," Obama said. "They don't want political talk. I'll just give you one example. Sen. Clinton and I were debating and she was asked about the bankruptcy law that she voted for in 2001. . . . During the debate she said, you know, 'I voted for it, but I hoped it wouldn't pass.' That was a quote on live TV. That kind of talk, I think it makes people not trust government."
Problem is, that's not what she said.
Obama is referring to a Jan. 15, 2008, Democratic debate in Las Vegas when Clinton was asked by moderator Tim Russert if she regretted her vote in favor of the 2001 bankruptcy bill.
Here's what Clinton said: "Sure I do, but it never became law, as you know. It got tied up. It was a bill that had some things I agreed with and other things I didn't agree with, and I was happy that it never became law. I opposed the 2005 bill as well."
The 2001 bankruptcy bill was intended as a dramatic overhaul of the bankruptcy laws, making it harder for people to eliminate debts in bankruptcy court and keeping wealthy debtors from using their homes as a shield for assets. It was hugely backed by the banking, credit card and retail credit industries. It passed the Senate, 83-15, on March 15, 2001, with the yes vote of Clinton, but because of differences in the House legislation, it never became law.
Four years later, bankruptcy reform finally did become law. Clinton missed that vote; Obama opposed it.
But back to the 2001 bill. Clinton said she was "happy that it never became law." He says she said, " 'I voted for it, but I hoped it wouldn't pass.' " The thing is, being happy about something after it happens is not the same as hoping along the way that it wouldn't happen. And yet, the latter is how Obama characterizes Clinton's words.
We need to be clear on this point, given that Obama sets up his charge against Clinton as an example of "political talk" and follows it up with, "That kind of talk, I think it makes people not trust government."
Absolutely, Clinton said she regretted her vote. And, had Obama phrased his charge differently, he would have a case here. But because he portrays her wording as a precise quote, and is so incorrect about it, we give him a False.
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At a campaign rally at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 10, 2008, Barack Obama opened his speech by talking about how Americans are feeling squeezed by the price of college, health care and gasoline.
"They've never paid more for gas at the pump," he said.
A month and a half ago, we found Obama was
inaccurate
for a similar statement, but we thought we should take another look.
A check of the latest numbers finds he is still wrong.
The Feb. 4 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration found the average price of gasoline was $2.98 a gallon, down 23 cents from the peak of $3.22 last May 21.
In fact, while the senator was in Alexandria, his motorcade drivers could have filled up for $2.92 a gallon at Barber's Auto Service Center, an Exxon station near the school.
We might have been inclined to cut Obama some slack for speaking in general terms about the price of gas, but he is still wrong when you look at historical levels. If you adjust for inflation, the current national price is still 41 cents below the peak of $3.39 per gallon, set in March 1981.
And so, we find his statement False.
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Faced with new projections showing a $482-billion federal budget deficit for 2009, Sen. John McCain tried to pin the blame on spending increases.
"It wasn't taxes, it was spending. We presided over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great Society and we mortgaged our children's futures, to the great disgrace of the Republican Party. We let earmarking and corrupt spending get to the point where we mortgaged our kids' futures," he said on CNN's
Larry King Live.
McCain is right when he argues that higher government spending caused most of the current gap between what the government collects and what it spends, according to an analysis of Congressional Budget Office data. But it's the federal budget, so it's not quite that simple.
In January 2001, CBO, the official scorekeepers of such things, projected government surpluses far into the future: $573-billion in 2007, $635-billion in 2008 and $710-billion in 2009.
Things didn't turn out so rosy. Earlier this year, CBO broke out the factors that have contributed to the transformation from surplus to deficit. For fiscal year 2007, almost all of the $735-billion change was due to "legislative" factors, and just $12-billion was due to economic and technical factors. In other words, Congress did it.
But measuring how much of the legislative changes were due to taxes and how much were due to spending is trickier. When the government spends more than it takes in, it borrows the remainder, and the interest charges are due in subsequent years. CBO doesn't parcel out the interest costs to the tax and spending sides of the budget, but the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does.
Their nitty-gritty calculation requires the quadratic equation, but the bottom line is McCain is right. For fiscal year 2007, 58 percent of the legislatively caused deterioration came from spending and 42 percent came from tax cuts. This year, taxes make up 52 percent of the change, because of those tax-rebate checks. But that's a temporary blip. In 2009, according to the projections, tax cuts' share of the blame will drop to 44 percent while spending's portion will rise to 56 percent.
One other note: all spending isn't equal. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis found that most of the spending increase didn't come from the earmarks or domestic programs that McCain complains about. It was defense and homeland security.
Until the rebates temporarily changed the equation, spending increases did cause the majority of the deficit. But tax cuts aren't blameless, either. We find McCain's claim to be Mostly True.
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Sen. Hillary Clinton made a strong new charge against Sen. Barack Obama on Feb. 28, 2008, suggesting that he doesn't care about the health needs of adults.
"I want ... each and every member of the family to have health insurance," she said at a campaign event in Hanging Rock, Ohio. "My opponent only wants your children to have health insurance. I don't think that's smart."
There's been lots of discussion about the differences in the candidates' health plans, and there are uncertainties about cost estimates and whether the plans could achieve universal coverage. (We have explored the health plans in detail in
this article
and in previous Truth-O-Meter items on Obama's claim
that Clinton would force people to buy insurance even if they can't afford it
and on Clinton's claim that
Obama's plan would leave out 15-million people).
But with her new claim, Sen. Clinton makes her strongest attack yet, suggesting that Obama is ignoring the needs of everyone except children.
We find that is not an accurate description of Obama's plan.
When PolitiFact asked the Clinton campaign about her comment, spokesman Mo Elleithee said Clinton was referring to the major difference between their plans: She would require everyone to purchase insurance (a mandate that has been likened to state requirements that drivers buy car insurance), while Obama only requires parents buy insurance for their children.
Clinton says the mandate is the best way to achieve universal coverage. But Obama says it could penalize people with modest incomes. If premiums don't drop enough after all his reforms are implemented, people would still be unable to afford insurance. If a law mandates they buy it anyway, they probably won't, he contends.
We won't go into all the details of Obama's plan, but it includes several elements that apply to adults:
• It would expand Medicaid, the federal program that provides health coverage for the poor.
• It would provide income-related subsidies to help people who don't qualify for Medicaid but still need financial help to buy coverage.
• It would require employers to provide health insurance for their workers, or contribute to the cost of the insurance.
If Clinton had said that Obama's plan "does not mandate insurance for adults," she would have been on solid ground. But she didn't and, given that Obama's plan has elements to expand coverage for adults, it is simply wrong to say he "
only
wants your children to have health insurance." We find her statement to be False.
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Celebrating a primary victory, Sen. Barack Obama roused the crowd at a Feb. 19, 2008, rally in Houston, Texas, when he went after inequities in corporate America.
"I believe in the free market," Obama said. "I know Texans believe in entrepreneurship. We are an independent and a self-reliant people. We don't believe in government doing what we can do for ourselves."
"But when we've got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year... " pause for applause from the audience, "and it's the CEOs who are getting a tax break and workers are left with nothing, then something is wrong, and something has to change."
Finding information to evaluate Obama's statistic was not easy. His campaign did not respond to inquiries. And we couldn't locate any reports supporting the "making more in 10 minutes" idea.
Here's what we did find:
• A 2007 report from the independent Institute for Policy Studies and the independent nonprofit United for a Fair Economy, "Executive Excess 2007," that states: "CEOs of large U.S. companies last year made as much money from just one day on the job as average workers make over the entire year." So, not 10 minutes, but in the ballpark.
• A 2007 report in
Forbes
magazine which states that the average salary for the 20 highest-paid chief executives is $145-million. Separately, in a 2007 U.S. Census report, we find that the median annual income for a full-time worker is $35,603. Assuming a 40-hour work week, with 50 work weeks a year, the 10-minute average salary of the highest-paid CEOs is $12,083. At this salary, it would take 30 minutes to exceed the annual salary for a full-time worker.
• Now in the same
Forbes
report on CEO compensation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is listed as the highest-paid boss of America's 500 biggest companies at $646.6-million a year. Doing the math on Jobs' income, he makes $53,883 in 10 minutes. That's $18,280 more than the average worker's annual salary.
So, while it's fair to say
some
CEOs "are making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in an entire year," Obama would be on safer ground if he qualified his statement. We rule his statement Mostly True.
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Sen. Barack Obama regularly makes the argument that he will be a stronger general election candidate than his primary opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton.
In a speech at a campaign rally on Feb. 10, 2008, he continued to expound on that theme, this time citing poll numbers.
"The last six polls, including this week's
Time
magazine, show that I beat John McCain by six or seven points," Obama declared at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va.
At the time of of his speech, several polls indeed showed Obama beating McCain by a six-point or more margin. The
Time
magazine poll showed him beating McCain by seven points, 48 to 41. An Associated Press/Ipsos showed him winning by six points, 48 to 42. A CNN poll showed him winning by eight points, 52 to 44.
But those are three polls, not six. (For a neat summary of recent Obama-McCain polling, check out this
link
from RealClearPolitics.com; we accessed it on Feb. 11, 2008.) We weren't able to find three other recent polls showing similar results.
It's possible that Obama has access to private polls we haven't seen. We asked the campaign for a response but didn't hear back.
So we will deduct a small amount on the Truth-O-Meter for his citing of "the last six polls," but Obama's larger point is correct. Polls show he is winning against McCain, while Clinton either loses to McCain or beats him by a smaller margin. So we award this statement a Mostly True.
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A new chain e-mail against Barack Obama recycles some false charges and adds some false twists.
The e-mail, forwarded to us by several readers, provides a new spin on the false claim that Obama refused to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance.
"Barack Hussein Obama will NOT recite the Pledge of Allegience nor will he show any reverence for our flag," it says. "While others place their hands over their hearts, Obama turns his back to the flag and slouches."
We have previously examined e-mail allegations that he attended a radical Muslim school
(so inaccurate we called it Pants on Fire),
that he took the oath of office with a Koran (also
Pants on Fire)
and that his middle name is Mohammed
(Pants on Fire).
We've also explored the questions surrounding
this photograph
from
Time
magazine's Web site, which prompted the allegations that he "refused to say the pledge"
(also False).
Now comes a new allegation, apparently relying on the same photo. Since this one is new to many readers, we'll revisit some of our previous findings and address the new charge about slouching. (This is the first time we can recall slouching being used as the basis for a political attack.)
The Obama photo was taken Sept. 16, 2007, 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."
Obama was on stage with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Harkin's wife Ruth.
As the
Time
caption indicates, the photo was taken during the national anthem, not the pledge, so the photo does not support the allegation that Obama "turns his back and . . . slouches" during the pledge. This is corroborated by
an ABC News video
of the occasion.
It's clear from the video that the assembled Democrats are not turning their backs on the flag to make an antipatriotic statement. They are looking at the same point — presumably the woman singing the anthem.
It is a matter of interpretation whether Obama is slouching as the anthem is played. The photo shows him with his hands clasped in front of his waist while the others have their hands over the heart (a point of anthem protocol that we addressed in
this item).
But it doesn't look to us like he's slouching and there's no evidence to suggest his posture was making an antipatriotic statement.
Obama has responded to these allegations by saying he often leads the pledge when he presides over the Senate, as seen in
this video from the Senate.
So once again, we find a chain e-mail is incorrect about Obama. We find the statement False.
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It's not often that we hear a Republican presidential candidate crowing about support from unions.
"I'm the only Republican who has gotten endorsements in this presidential race from major labor unions, the international painters union as well as the machinists and aerospace workers — first time in over 100 years from either union," Huckabee said in a TV interview the day after Super Tuesday.
Huckabee is correct on a few points here.
Unions don't usually endorse Republican candidates, and they support Democratic candidates with contributions by margins of roughly 9 to 1, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But this year, two unions decided to endorse candidates in the primaries for both parties: The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades with 160,000 members, and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers with 720,000 members.
In the Democratic race, both unions endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton, and in the Republican race, both endorsed Mike Huckabee.
We called both unions and they confirmed the "100 years" statement because it's the first time they've endorsed Republican candidates since they formed more than 100 years ago.
James Williams, head of the International Painters, said the union decided to endorse Republicans this year as a way of reflecting the sentiments of their Republican members, who make up about 30 percent of the union. The painters mailed out a ballot to more than 160,000 members and asked them to vote in each race and Huckabee was the GOP choice.
Add to that the fact that some members live in heavily Republican areas and are represented by Republican elected officials, he said. The endorsement is a way of reaching out beyond the unions' usual Democratic allies.
"The reality is that we have to work across the aisle with both Democrats and Republicans," Williams said. "It hasn't been done in the last seven years. But hopefully whoever is elected next will realize we can't have this polarization."
Huckabee may have won the endorsements because he actively campaigned for them. He was the only Republican to attend the national convention of the machinists' union in August 2007.
He also speaks regularly on the need for fair trade agreements and the problems of working men and women. Critics and supporters alike have described him as an "economic populist."
Not that Huckabee's union record is flawless: Unions have criticized him for crossing picket lines of the Writers Guild of America to appear on late-night television shows, among other things.
We searched for major union endorsements of any other Republican candidates and were unable to find one. A spokesperson with the AFL-CIO said the Huckabee endorsements were the only ones they knew of.
There are a lot of unusual things about Huckabee, a bass guitar-playing, Chuck Norris-approved preacher. Add Republican and union-endorsed to that list. We find his statement True.
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