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goop-02426 | Scarlett Johansson Laughs At Colin Jost’s “Dirty” Talk? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/scarlett-johansson-laughs-colin-jost-dirty-talk-sex/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Scarlett Johansson Laughs At Colin Jost’s “Dirty” Talk? | 4:38 pm, September 23, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-02760 | President Obama Signs Executive Order to Appoint Rashad Hussain to Supreme Court | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/president-obama-signs-executive-order-to-appoint-rashad-hussain-to-supreme-court/ | null | obama | null | null | null | President Obama Signs Executive Order to Appoint Rashad Hussain to Supreme Court | Feb 23, 2016 | null | ['Rashad_Hussain', 'Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-11357 | We’ve started building the wall. | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/apr/04/donald-trump/donald-trump-wrongly-claims-border-wall-under-cons/ | President Donald Trump claimed his administration has kicked off one of his landmark campaign promises: the construction of a border wall with Mexico. "We have to have strong borders. We need the wall. We’ve started building the wall, as you know, we have a $1.6 billion toward building the wall and fixing existing wall that’s falling down, it was never appropriate in the first place," Trump said standing next to Baltic leaders during an April 3 press conference. Trump made similar remarks in Ohio on March 29: "We started building our wall. I'm so proud of it. We started. … We have $1.6 billion." And on March 28 tweeted pictures of construction work at the border and wrote, "Great briefing this afternoon on the start of our Southern Border WALL!" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Trump’s words leave the impression that construction is underway for the border wall he promised, and that $1.6 billion is helping pay for it. That’s not the case. There are projects underway along parts of the border to improve or replace fencing, but none of that includes any of the eight border wall prototypes ordered by the Trump administration. In fact, U.S. Customs and Border Protection told PolitiFact this week that a prototype has not been selected. The White House did not respond on the record to our request for comment. $1.6 billion is for fencing, not border wall Trump reluctantly signed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill on March 23 that he threatened to veto in part because his promised border wall was "not fully funded." The bill included $1.6 billion for some projects at the border, but none of that can be used toward the border wall promised during the presidential campaign. The bill said the designated funds "shall only be available for operationally effective designs deployed as of the date of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017" (May 5, 2017), "such as currently deployed steel bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety." The specific uses are: • $251 million for approximately 14 miles of secondary fencing along the southwest border in the San Diego sector; • $445 million for 25 miles of primary pedestrian levee fencing along the southwest border in the Rio Grande Valley Sector; • $196 million for primary pedestrian fencing along the southwest border in the Rio Grande Valley Sector; • $445 million for replacement of existing primary pedestrian fencing along the southwest border; • $38 million for border barrier planning and design; and • $196 million for acquisition and deployment of border security technology "This is replacing and improving existing fences," said Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank. According to Los Angeles Times reporting, the photos Trump shared in his March 28 tweet about "the start of our southern border WALL" were for the replacement of an estimated 2.25-mile border wall in Calexico, Calif., built in the 1990s using recycled scraps of metal and old landing mat. That barrier is being replaced with a 30-foot high bollard-style wall. Plans for that replacement began in 2009 and were funded in 2017, the newspaper reported. The Los Angeles Times quoted Jonathan Pacheco, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector as having said earlier in March: "First and foremost, this isn’t Trump’s wall. This isn’t the infrastructure that Trump is trying to bring in. … This new wall replacement has absolutely nothing to do with the prototypes that were shown over in the San Diego area." Customs and Border Protection issued a news release March 30 headlined, "Border Wall Construction Underway." The release said the $1.6 billion funding would provide for the construction of about 100 miles of new border wall. It uses the term "border wall" to refer to fencing and other structures, not the prototypes Trump has touted. It highlights, among other construction, the 20-mile replacement of primary vehicle barrier in Santa Teresa, N.M.; the replacement in San Diego of 14 miles of outdated steel plate barrier with a bollard structure; the replacement of at least two miles of border barrier in Calexico with 30-foot bollard wall; and four miles of bollard wall in El Paso. "We’re building 35 new gates along a stretch of 55 miles of existing border wall," acting deputy commissioner Ronald Vitiello said in the release. Trump's claim "not only conflates walls and fences, but also plays into Trump's false narrative that there are not already barriers along much of the border," said Hannah R. Gurman, a clinical associate professor at New York University who has researched the history of U.S. immigration enforcement and its intersection with criminal prosecution. As far as the prototypes go, it’s uncertain if one of them will be built at the border as designed. The Department of Homeland Security "does not anticipate" that a single prototype will be selected as the design standard for future border wall construction, said Customs and Border Protection spokesman Carlos Diaz. "Rather, the eight different prototypes are each anticipated to inform future border wall design standards in some capacity," Diaz told PolitiFact April 2. Diaz said the agency has tested, assessed and evaluated the prototypes to determine which of them most effectively stops illegal crossings. Evaluators have proposed new features to add to CBP’s "toolkit" of border wall designs, Diaz said. PolitiFact’s Trump-O-Meter is tracking Trump’s promise to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. It rates In the Works because the promise has been proposed or is being considered. Our ruling Trump said, "We’ve started building the wall." There are projects underway to replace existing border fencing and to add some new barriers. But it’s disingenuous to claim they amount to the border wall Trump has long promised. A recent appropriation of $1.6 billion allows the replacement of existing fencing, but not the construction of any sort of wall prototype. CBP said the prototypes will be used "to inform" future design standards. We rate Trump’s claim Mostly False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-04-04T11:27:23 | 2018-04-03 | ['None'] |
pomt-08145 | We are giving almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to the junk food and fast food industries every year to make the (childhood obesity) epidemic worse. | false | /ohio/statements/2010/dec/06/dennis-kucinich/rep-dennis-kucinich-assails-tax-deductions-fast-fo/ | Childhood obesity in the United States has more than tripled the last 30 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and the American Heart Association. It has reached epidemic levels and increased risks for heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer and osteoarthritis. The inactivity associated with watching television has long taken much of the blame. But a recent UCLA study reported in the American Journal of Public Health found that commercials, not TV itself, were the link to obesity. In fact, it found no association with television viewing and obesity for those who watched videos or commercial-free programming. For Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the implication is clear: Taxpayers are subsidizing the obesity epidemic by providing tax breaks to the food industry for marketing fast food and junk food to children. "We are giving almost $2 billion of taxpayer money to the junk food and fast food industries every year to make the (childhood obesity) epidemic worse," he said in a news release Nov. 10. That whet our appetite for curiosity. So PolitiFact Ohio sank its teeth into Kucinich’s claim that taxpayer dollars are used to market to bad food to children. On the ills of fast food and marketing efforts, Kucinich cited a new study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University: "The research is clear. Eating fast food harms young people’s health," the study says. And it concludes that efforts to market fast food to children are both effective and rapidly expanding. The fast food industry spent more than $4.2 billion in 2009 on TV commercials and radio, magazine, outdoor and other ads, the Rudd study said. The industry spent nearly $2 billion in 2006 on marketing and advertising specifically aimed at children, according to a report to Congress from Federal Trade Commission. But how do taxpayers subsidize that? That answer is simple. Fast food marketers get the same break that other businesses do. The federal tax code allows companies to deduct "reasonable and necessary" expenses of marketing and advertising from their income taxes. That doesn’t sit well with Kucinich when the marketing targets kids. The Cleveland Democrat introduced a bill, HR 4310, to eliminate that tax deduction. The bill attracted 28 co-sponsors and has been referred to the Ways and Means Committee. Kucinich's bill would prohibit any company from claiming a tax deduction for the expense of marketing fast food to children. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation estimated "on a very preliminary basis" that the legislation could raise $15 billion to $19 billion in additional federal revenue over the 10-year budget period -- "which is almost 2 billion per year," said Kucinich’s press aide. A revenue estimate from the Joint Committee is treated as confidential unless released by the member of Congress who requested it. Confidentiality allows the committee staff to maintain its nonpartisan role in the policy process. Kucinich’s office gave us a copy of the staff letter with the committee’s estimate, but we were unable to get background details. But the letter notes that a number of unsettled issues surround the bill -- ranging from defining "fast food restaurant" or "food of a poor nutritional quality" to determining what constitutes advertising that is "primarily aimed at" children -- and all of those issues would affect the bill’s impact (including the amount of new tax revenue). The committee’s estimate clearly covered more than the child-oriented fast food advertising in the 2006 FTC survey. At the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent, the $2 billion cited in that report would have yielded about $700 million in additional tax revenue. A study from the National Bureau of Economic Research does support Kucinich’s assertion that eliminating the tax break would reduce the number of overweight children. Eliminating the tax deduction would reduce the number of overweight children by 5 to 7 percent, it said, and banning advertising to children would prompt an even larger reduction. So where does that leave us on Kucinich’s assertion? Kucinich inflated the tax revenue benefits of his bill, rounding up from the high end of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s soft and "very preliminary" estimate. That revenue estimate is nearly triple the tax benefit that would be generated by the firmest number we found for advertising specifically aimed at children, the $2 billion figure in the 2006 FTC study. Regardless of which estimate is best, Kucinich’s assertion that fast food marketers are using "almost $2 billion of taxpayer money" is off base. It’s not tax revenue that’s being spent. Rather, it’s an estimate of money the fast food industry didn’t have to pay in taxes as a result of deductions for business expenses that every business can take. Childhood obesity is a serious topic and the congressman may be nobly intentioned. But dollar figure he uses is shaky at best and his description of the money as taxpayer dollars is misleading. That’s why we rate Kucinich’s claim as False. | null | Dennis Kucinich | null | null | null | 2010-12-06T06:00:00 | 2010-11-10 | ['None'] |
faan-00008 | “While the unemployment rate might be decreasing, the kinds of new jobs created in Canada are part-time.” | factscan score: misleading | http://factscan.ca/ndp-part-time-jobs/ | The latest job figures show that full-time work is growing more than part-time work in recent months in 2018 and in 2017, compared to the month or year before. There is longer-term and older data that show part-time work has driven total employment growth, but it’s misleading to make a claim about “new jobs” and ignore the latest data. | null | NDP | null | null | null | 2018-04-27 | null | ['Canada'] |
snes-05091 | A 1964 campaign ad for President Lyndon B. Johnson featured a purported Republican voter expressing concerns which eerily echoed threads of debate in the GOP in 2016. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/confessions-of-a-republican/ | null | Ballot Box | null | Kim LaCapria | null | ‘Confessions of a Republican’ | 9 March 2016 | null | ['Republican_Party_(United_States)', 'Lyndon_B._Johnson'] |
pomt-10146 | John McCain's health care plan "leaves you on your own to pay McCain’s health insurance tax." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/03/barack-obama/health-care-ad-is-right----until-the-end/ | A new ad from Barack Obama attacks John McCain's health care plan. "John McCain talks about a $5,000 tax credit for health care," an announcer says. "But here’s what he’s not telling you. McCain would make you pay income tax on your health insurance benefits. Taxing health benefits for the first time ever. And that tax credit? McCain’s own Web site said it goes straight to the insurance companies, not to you, leaving you on your own to pay McCain’s health insurance tax. Taxing health care instead of fixing it. We can’t afford John McCain." The ad has a good bit of truth in it, but the notion that it leaves you "on your own" to pay a new tax on insurance is deceptive. Let's back up a minute, though, to explain a few features of current health care policy and how McCain's proposal would change it. Most Americans who have health insurance — about 71 percent — get it through their employer. Usually, the premiums are split so that the employer pays part and the employee pays part. Strictly speaking, the part that the employer pays is considered compensation and workers would owe taxes on it if there wasn't a tax exemption in federal law. The exemption makes employer-provided health insurance more attractive to both workers and employers. McCain wants to improve the health care system by encouraging greater competition for health insurance. His idea is that people should be able to go out on the open market and buy their own health insurance, and not be pushed into an employer-provided insurance plan by tax incentives. So under McCain's plan, the tax exemption for employer provided health insurance would disappear, and people would get a tax credit of $2,500 per person ($5,000 for couples) to spend on any health insurance they wish. They might choose to use their employer's plan and use the tax credit to offset the new tax on the benefit, or they might go off and buy insurance on their own. At times, the McCain campaign has touted the credit without mentioning the proposed repeal of the tax exemption on employer-provided insurance. (For an example, see the exchange on health care insurance between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 3, 2008.) The ad reminds viewers — fairly, in our view — about the end of the tax exemption, an important part of the overall McCain plan. But then the ad says, "McCain’s own Web site said it goes straight to the insurance companies, not to you, leaving you on your own to pay McCain’s health insurance tax." McCain's Web site does say that, but there's an excellent reason that the credit goes to the insurance companies. It's so people don't blow the tax credit on cigarettes and beer (or whatever else they'd like) instead of health insurance. Under McCain's plan, workers would pay taxes on the health exemption, but they would get $2,500 knocked off their health insurance bill. If workers come out ahead and there's money left over, that would go into a health spending account for them to spend on health-related incidentals. It's a complex switcheroo, but there's ample evidence to show that the plan would be a wash for most workers. The McCain campaign says only workers with "gold-plated" health programs would do worse. An independent analysis from the nonpartisan Urban Institute confirms that: "In general, lower-income people with health insurance would receive benefits from the credit that would be well in excess of the value that they receive from today’s tax exemption. The gains are much smaller for higher-income people." So the Obama ad gets its particulars correct, but ends with an unfair assertion. McCain's health plan does not leave you "on your own to pay McCain’s health insurance tax." We rate Obama'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. | null | Barack Obama | null | null | null | 2008-10-03T00:00:00 | 2008-10-03 | ['None'] |
pomt-05504 | This rule could prevent children under 18 from using such tools as a power screwdriver, a milking machine or something as simple as a wheelbarrow on the family farm . . . | mostly false | /tennessee/statements/2012/apr/15/lamar-alexander/lamar-alexander-says-child-farm-labor-rules-could-/ | Update (April 27, 2012): On Thursday, the Department of Labor withdrew the proposed changes to the child labor rule in response to opposition from lawmakers and farmers. It actually came out just hours after our partners at PolitiFact Florida had posted a ruling on a similar claim by Florida Congressman Tom Rooney. A Department of Labor press release dated April 26 reads: "The decision to withdraw this rule – including provisions to define the 'parental exemption' – was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms. To be clear, this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration." It added that the department will instead work with rural stakeholders to develop a program to promote safety. The Department of Labor’s announcement -- while good news for Alexander and Rooney and others who opposed the rule -- does not affect our rating in this fact-check. Alexander and Rooney failed to prove that children working on farms would be banned from operating a battery-powered screwdriver or a pressurized garden hose, and the Department of Labor specifically said those activities would not be prohibited under the proposed rule. --------------- Tennessee’s senior senator has co-sponsored a bill to prevent the Department of Labor from enacting proposed rules regarding child labor in agricultural settings. He says the rules are over the top – they "take the cake," he says – and take "job opportunities from our nation’s youth." Alexander is talking about proposed changes in the Fair Labor Standards Act regarding child labor on farms that take up 49 pages of fine print in the Federal Register published on Sept. 2 of last year. According to a Dec. 12, 2011, post from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, "We want to ensure that children of farm families maintain their ability to help with the family farm, while working to prevent unnecessary child injuries or deaths." According to Vilsack, "while only 4 percent of working youth are in the agriculture sector, 40 percent of fatalities of working kids are associated with machines, equipment, or facilities related to agriculture." So we decided to look at whether the proposed rules would prohibit some kid under 18 from carting a load of alfalfa to the manger or tightening up a license plate on a pickup before heading out on the blacktop. First, we asked Alexander’s office specifically for support for his contention that the bill would prevent children from using a power screwdriver or wheelbarrows. Alexander spokesman Jim Jeffries cautioned that the senator only said "could," not "would," but he also provided the text of the rule dealing with unpowered conveyances that he says could apply to wheelbarrows: "The proposed Ag H.O. would prohibit hired farm workers under 16 years of age from operating and assisting in the operation of hoisting apparatus and conveyors that are not power-driven but run on human power or gravity, including manlifts and boatswain-chair-type devices often used in grain storage operations." It goes on to spell things out in even more specific detail, though never mentions wheelbarrows. It’s pretty arcane stuff and there’s a lot of legalese in the proposed rules, making them an easy target for ridicule, but it is a serious set of rules. The release finishes by claiming: "It would even ban youth from operating a battery-powered screwdriver or a pressurized garden hose." When Alexander’s office pointed to the rules themselves for support, we looked them over. A search for "milking equipment" did quickly lead to a section listing various kinds of "power-driven machinery" that could not be used by working children and student learners (like kids with 4-H and Future Farmers of America) and milking equipment was not only listed but singled out for explanation. The section says that "a study of 988 worker's compensation claims among dairy farms in Colorado found that milking parlor tasks represented 48% of injuries among dairy workers and indicated the worker was performing a milking activity at the time of the injury." However, the third sentence of the first paragraph of the summary of the proposed rules changes, as published by the DOL, reads as follows: "The proposed agricultural revisions would impact only hired farm workers and in no way compromise the statutory child labor parental exemption involving children working on farms owned or operated by their parents." So, no matter the government rules, if a parent with some ownership in the farm tells a child to crank up the milking machine, there’s nothing to prohibit it. That seems like an important and broad exception, given that the bill sponsored by Alexander and 44 others has as its title: "Preserving America's Family Farm Act." If you’re working your own parent’s farm, the new rules don’t apply at all, and the act also contains many exemptions for programs, like 4-H, aimed at giving youth experience working on farms. If Alexander meant some other family’s farm, where the child is a paid laborer, it’s worth noting that The Child Labor Coalition pointed out there were 16 fatal injuries in 2011 of children working under the age of 16 -- 12 of them involving crop production. The Department of Labor has come under significant attack for this attempt to more closely align child labor rules on farms with labor rules for other work, and it has responded by saying it believes it has a public duty to look after child laborers being paid to work on a farm not belonging to their parent. Technically, the new rules don’t specifically mention screwdrivers, wheelbarrows or garden hoses. The Department of Labor told us the rules would not in fact prevent their use by children working on a farm. "There is no part of Senator Alexander’s press release that accurately reflects the proposed rule," a spokesperson for the Department of Labor wrote in an email. The department also points out there has been substantial time for public review, and it will take into consideration the huge amount of feedback the rules have received. As with a lot of commentary on alleged over-regulation and government overreach into the realm of private business, we suspected there might be more to Alexander’s and many others’ concerns that do not involve wheelbarrows full of alfalfa or showing Bessie off at the county fair. Might the pushback be related to migrant child labor employed by big agribusiness concerns? Typical of the more than 4,100 written submissions from the public are those from Cliff and Bertha Gardner of Ruby Valley, Nev., who wrote: "This rule will have a dramatic effect on our Ranching Operation. We will not be able to work our Grandchildren, Nieces and Nephews. It is much better to teach these young people to work at an early age than have them getting into trouble in town because there is nothing to do." David Arbogast, in his public submission to the DOL, skated a little closer to what really may be at stake for big agribusiness interests when he asked, "Could this proposal also be racially motivated to further block Latino children from working the fields with their parents? Again, the government has no business meddling in the family’s parenting duties." The American Farm Bureau Federation’s submission, the Washington-based non-profit promoting agriculture, asked that the federal rules not duplicate regulations on the books at the state level. In Washington State, it points out, minors as young as 12 pick strawberries and farms hire teachers, school bus drivers "and others in the supervision of the minor work crews." In California, it notes, minors 12 and 13 may work in agriculture up to 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week "on non-school days." It turns out many children work in agribusiness enterprises side by side with impoverished migrant worker adults, and a lot of them get injured. While it may be quaint, the image of a farm boy in overalls may be a misleading focus for rules seeking to address the reality of child labor on those farms that actually generate most of the nation’s food. The last week of March was National Farmworker Awareness Week, some of it focused on child labor. A peer-reviewed article in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics noted: "Relatively few adolescents are employed on farms compared with other types of industry, yet the proportion of fatalities in agriculture is higher than that for any other type of adolescent employment." Clearly, the rationale for the upgraded standards is a concern for the welfare of young workers and for minimizing specific workplace injuries the department has investigated. That’s what the rules actually say; they’re based on actual injuries. The report in some sections is not for the squeamish, detailing sometimes gruesome injuries and deaths like youths chewed up in various kinds of machinery. Such concerns date to the turn of the last century and are memorialized in the findings of the National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health which routinely look at promoting safe work conditions for young workers. You can see an example of the agency’s concern from 1999 here. "The reason the labor laws are in place is…because there have been kids who have been hurt," said Diane E. Bush, coordinator of the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California-Berkeley. "Most people think of the workplace as a safe place where young people are going to learn responsibility and it will have a positive impact on them. "It’s important to make sure they’re working in an environment where that’s going to happen, rather than ending up with a serious or even worse, a fatal injury." Our ruling The proposed rules could limit the kinds of potentially dangerous work children might perform on "family" farms owned by someone else’s family. To make their point, however, Alexander and many others are not mentioning the parental exemption and then using examples of some activities the labor department says are not the target of its revised rules. The proposed rules are aimed at protecting children involved in agribusiness, not at children learning farming from their flannel-clad dads. We find the orchestrated criticism misleading and rule Alexander’s statement Mostly False. | null | Lamar Alexander | null | null | null | 2012-04-15T06:00:00 | 2012-03-22 | ['None'] |
pomt-11449 | Says Sen. Tammy Baldwin "claims to support a 'Buy America' philosophy, but her actions speak louder than her empty words." | false | /wisconsin/statements/2018/mar/12/leah-vukmir/Vukmir-misfires-on-Baldwin-trade-barb/ | Global trade is a hot button issue that got even hotter when President Donald Trump announced on March 1, 2018 that he would impose tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. In a tweet, Trump framed it this way: "Our Steel and Aluminum industries (and many others) have been decimated by decades of unfair trade and bad policy with countries from around the world. We must not let our country, companies and workers be taken advantage of any longer. We want free, fair and SMART TRADE!" That harkened back to Trump’s inauguration speech, when he declared: "We will follow two simple rules: ‘Buy American and hire American.’" U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, has touted a similar Buy American theme, and has introduced a bill to require the use of U.S. steel and iron on some government water projects. Indeed, during an April 2017 visit to Snap-On in Kenosha, Trump endorsed Baldwin’s legislation: "I support the concept of everything from the U.S. I’m very much into that and I agree with her 100 percent." Meanwhile, state Sen. Leah Vukmir of Brookfield, a Republican who hopes to challenge Baldwin in November 2018, has trashed Baldwin’s "Buy American" record as "empty words." In an op-ed piece posted Jan. 25, 2018, on the Daily Caller website, Vukmir argued Baldwin’s support for Buy American is more show than substance. Vukmir’s piece read, in part: Senator Baldwin and her colleagues in Washington were given a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform an outdated, broken and costly tax code that discouraged job growth and investment in America, failed to reward the middle-class or boost economic growth, and lined the pockets of Washington D.C. special interests, all at the expense of hard-working citizens and small businesses. She claims to support a "Buy America" philosophy, but her actions speak louder than her empty words. Is it true, as Vukmir claims, that Baldwin supports a proposal at the same time she is undermining it with her votes? The supporting evidence When asked to provide backup to support the "actions speak louder than her empty words" claim, Vukmir communications staffer Mattias Gugel wrote: "When it comes to helping Wisconsin’s middle class and making America more competitive through pro-growth policies like tax reform, repealing Davis–Bacon and right to work, Sen. Baldwin stands in the way every single time." Here are brief explanations of those references: Tax reform: In December 2017, Trump signed into law a $1.5 trillion tax bill, capping a yearlong effort by the White House and Republicans in Congress to cut tax rates for corporations and individuals. The legislation marked the first major reform of the American tax system in more than 30 years. Baldwin labeled the plan a "giveaway to the wealthiest few" and voted against the measure Davis-Bacon: The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 is a federal law that requires local "prevailing wage" pay for laborers and mechanics on public works projects. It applies to "contractors and subcontractors performing on federally funded or assisted contracts in excess of $2,000 for the construction, alteration, or repair (including painting and decorating) of public buildings or public works." Conservative Republicans have tried to repeal Davis-Bacon, but the provision has the strong backing of the trades unions, as well as Democrats, including Baldwin, along with many moderate Republicans. Right-to-work: These provisions exist in 28 states, including Wisconsin. In general, they provide that employees in unionized workplaces may not be compelled to join a union, nor compelled to pay for any part of the cost of union representation, while generally receiving the same benefits as union members who do contribute. Baldwin opposed the "right-to-work" measure in 2015 when it was approved in Wisconsin, arguing it would "weaken the economic security of hard working middle class families." So, Baldwin has opposed the three measures. But each of those examples applies more broadly to economic-related matters than to a specific Buy American plan, which was the subject of Vukmir’s claim. And, if related matters are tallied on one side of the ledger, it’s only fair to look at other actions by Baldwin. The other side of the coin Baldwin made the "Buy American" legislation a highlight of the first TV ads in her re-election campaign. They began running Feb. 27, 2018. In an email, campaign spokesman Bill Neidhardt cited a series of additional measures specifically related to Buy American: 1. As a member of the House of Representatives, Baldwin introduced the CHEATS Act during the 112th Congress (2011-2012). The measure, which did not pass, would have allowed the U.S. to impose duties on Chinese imports that were receiving illegal subsidies from the Chinese government, allowing them to undercut the prices of Wisconsin’s manufacturers. 2. During the 115th Congress (2017-2018), Baldwin introduced a bill to require the president to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. The TPP, put in place under President Barack Obama, was a 12-nation agreement among the United States and Pacific-rim countries that was designed in part to counter China’s rising dominance of the region. Shortly after taking office in January 2017, Trump formally abandoned the agreement. Baldwin had labeled TPP "a bad deal for American workers." "Instead of creating an even playing field, this deal increases the global race to the bottom in worker pay," Baldwin said in a Jan. 23, 2017, news release. "American manufacturing jobs will continue to go abroad as Buy American rules are further eroded." 3. In addition, on Feb. 20, 2018 Baldwin announced the Made in American Shipbuilding Act, which would require any vessel that was paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars to be constructed with American parts and by American workers. (A footnote: When we asked Baldwin for her position on Trump’s tariff plan, she took a tempered approach, saying she supports sending a "strong message to bad actors" like Russia and China, but fears a blanket tariff could start a trade war that could hurt Wisconsin manufacturers and the state's agricultural economy.) Our rating Vukmir said Baldwin "claims to support a ‘Buy American’ philosophy, but her actions speak louder than her empty words." Vukmir cited several broad matters that relate to the economy, but none that specifically applied to undermining Buy American initiatives. Meanwhile, Baldwin has been engaged with other "Buy American" actions. Indeed, at times her views seem to align with Trump’s "America First" policies. We rate Vukmir’s claim False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Leah Vukmir | null | null | null | 2018-03-12T14:50:19 | 2018-01-25 | ['Tammy_Baldwin'] |
pomt-12434 | Law firm @POTUS used to show he has no ties to Russia was named Russia Law Firm of the Year for their extensive ties to Russia. Unreal. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/may/16/chris-murphy/donald-trump-chris-murphy-russian-law-firm-year/ | President Donald Trump made public a letter from his tax attorneys on May 12 saying Trump’s tax returns from the past decade contain no undisclosed income from Russian sources. That same day, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., found what was a too-good-to-pass-up irony about the firm Trump used to write the letter. "Law firm @POTUS used to show he has no ties to Russia was named Russia Law Firm of the Year for their extensive ties to Russia. Unreal," Murphy said in a May 12 tweet. The post was certainly popular -- it has been retweeted 56,000 times as of the writing of this fact-check. It also elicited an eye-rolling .GIF from Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Given the continued interest in possible links between Trump and Russia, we decided to look into Murphy’s statement. Morgan Lewis earned 'Russia Law Firm of the Year' title Trump’s tax lawyers are partners in the Washington, D.C., office of Morgan Lewis, which employs some 2,000 attorneys in 30 cities around the world, including 40 lawyers and staff in Moscow. In the May 12 letter, Trump’s attorneys generally downplayed the president’s ties to Russia, and said Trump’s tax returns from the past decade contain no undisclosed income from Russian sources. Murphy is correct that Morgan Lewis was once named the "Russia Law Firm of the Year." This award was bestowed in 2016 by Chambers & Partners, a reputable source of law firm rankings, which cited the firm’s work in Russia’s energy, finance and technology sectors. Murphy’s spokesman, Chris Harris, also pointed us to an item on Morgan Lewis’ website trumpeting the accolade, calling it a "prestigious honor" that recognizes its Russia office’s excellence in client service, strategic growth and other achievements. Elsewhere on Morgan Lewis’ website the firm boasts about its Moscow office, saying "Our lawyers are well known in the Russian market, and have deep familiarity with the local legislation, practices, and key players." So what? So Murphy is basically right on the facts: (1) Trump did use a letter from his Morgan Lewis tax attorneys to downplay Russia ties, (2) Morgan Lewis was named "Russia Law Firm of the Year," and (3) the firm has extensive Russia ties. That said, it would be wrong to conclude that by hiring Morgan Lewis, Trump shares the firm’s extensive Russia ties. That’s unproven. A Morgan Lewis spokesman told ABC News none of the firm’s attorneys have handled any business dealings for Trump in Russia. The spokesman added that Trump’s tax attorney, Sheri Dillon, has never been to Russia and does no work there. The reality is, beyond a laugh line, there’s not much people should read into Murphy’s statement. By the same logic, for instance, Trump’s tough talk toward Germany would potentially be undermined by the fact his tax attorneys work in a firm that operates an office in Frankfurt. And unless Murphy were willing to credit Trump for Morgan Lewis’ progressive telecommuting policy to help working parents, his position would lack coherence. Our ruling Murphy said, "Law firm @POTUS used to show he has no ties to Russia was named Russia Law Firm of the Year for their extensive ties to Russia. Unreal." While any suggestion Trump shares the law firm's extensive ties is unproven, Murphy has the basic facts correct. The tax attorneys Trump has used to minimize his Russia ties are partners at Morgan Lewis, the 2016 "Russia Law Firm of the Year," which boasts significant work in Russia. The firm, however, says that Trump’s lawyer has done no work in Russia. We rate Murphy’s statement Mostly True. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Chris Murphy | null | null | null | 2017-05-16T14:59:14 | 2017-05-12 | ['Russia', 'President_of_the_United_States'] |
pomt-03991 | Says U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, was elected in a "very low turnout" race. | half-true | /wisconsin/statements/2013/feb/10/chris-matthews/chris-matthews-says-sen-ron-johnson-was-elected-ve/ | For anyone still keeping score on pundit reaction to the clash between then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin over the attack on U.S. diplomats in Libya: Don’t count Chris Matthews in the Johnson camp. To say the least. The host of the MSNBC-TV talk show "Hardball" lambasted the questions and remarks that Johnson, a Republican, addressed to Clinton when she appeared before a Senate committee on Jan. 23, 2013. Matthews and two guests that night heaped praise on Clinton, while ripping Johnson’s queries about the way the attacks were initially portrayed to the public. Matthews went on to question, at least implicitly, the legitimacy of Johnson’s 2010 win over Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold. That mid-term election saw Republicans regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives and pick up seats in the Senate, including this one. "That was kind of a pissant performance by that guy from Wisconsin," Matthews said of Johnson’s questioning of Clinton. "I don't know how these guys get over the wall into American politics. I think they won in a very low turnout elections (sic) in Wisconsin." Matthews was just getting warmed up. He added: "I think everybody should run now in national elections, forced to go into elections where there's a lot of voters, so you don't get this weird, warped sense of people coming who supposedly represent the American electorate. That guy doesn't represent anybody." Wisconsin, in our memory, typically has high turnout elections. But is Matthews right that Johnson was elected in a "very low turnout" one? Depends on the point of comparison. Compared with the 2008 and 2012 presidential years, the 2010 election in Wisconsin drew about 800,000-900,000 fewer voters, with the Senate race and a gubernatorial contest leading the ballot, state turnout data shows. That gap is a well-known feature of American politics. In those two presidential years, about 72 percent of voting-eligible Wisconsinites turned out, and it was even higher -- almost 75 percent -- in 2004, according to calculations and analysis by the United States Election Project at George Mason University. By contrast, Wisconsin turnout in the 2010 midterm election featuring Johnson-Feingold was about 52 percent of eligible voters. So from that perspective, the turnout was lower. MSNBC spokeswoman Lauren Skowronski told us that Matthews meant just such a comparison in his remarks. She explained further that Matthews’ reference to multiple candidates -- "they won in very low turnout elections in Wisconsin" -- likely referred to Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who also won in that 2010 election. On his show, Matthews also longed for a system where everybody runs in the higher-turnout presidential years. That’s his opinion, of course, so we can’t fact check it. But we can note that such a change would require a constitutional amendment, because Article One fixes those terms at six years for senators and two for House members. Case closed? Hardly. We wondered: How did the 2010 midterm here stack up to midterms past -- and to similar contests in other states? At 52 percent, turnout in 2010 was slightly lower than the 2006 turnout of 53 percent and significantly higher than the 45 percent in 2002, according to data from the George Mason project’s website. If you go back to 1998 -- when Feingold nipped Republican challenger Mark Neumann in a midterm -- the turnout was considerably lower than in the 2010 race that Matthews termed "very low turnout." In fact, in 1998, Feingold’s vote total was 230,000 lower than his future challenger Johnson received in 2010. So there’s also fodder for saying that 2010 was a typical turnout year, or even high compared to a couple other relatively recent midterms. But Matthews’ statement put things in a national perspective -- "I don't know how these guys get over the wall into American politics." So, how did turnout in Wisconsin stack up? In 2010, the turnout in Wisconsin ran 11 percentage points above the U.S. average. Only six states had higher turnout on the day Johnson defeated Feingold: Minnesota, Maine, Washington, South Dakota, Oregon and Alaska. It’s not hard to find examples of Democratic Party senators who won in November 2010 in states with lower turnout than Wisconsin. Among them: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Barbara Boxer of California and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. We found that Wisconsin’s turnout is typically around the top 5 no matter the year, based on six elections we reviewed. There were even five states that had lower turnout in the 2012 presidential contest than Wisconsin did in the midterm year of 2010, according to the George Mason data. They were: Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Hawaii. Michael McDonald, the George Mason professor behind the elections project, said the Republican Party generally -- but not always -- gets an advantage in lower turnout midterm elections. Younger voters, the poor and minority voters come out in smaller numbers than in presidential election years, cutting into the modern Democratic Party’s base, he noted. It can cut the other way, too. Democrat Tammy Baldwin won Wisconsin’s other Senate seat in 2012 amid the higher turnout in the presidential year. The 2012 electorate included a higher percentage of liberals, city-dwellers and young voters, and a lower percentage of Republicans, than the 2010 electorate, our Journal Sentinel colleague Craig Gilbert reported in a "Wisconsin Voter" story in November 2012. University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and pollster Charles Franklin said it was "crazy talk" by Matthews if the MSNBC host was arguing that the only way a conservative such as Ron Johnson could win was in a midterm election. National "wave" elections favoring one party or the other can factor in, and the particulars of each campaign factor in as well. Franklin noted that Jim Doyle, the Democrat who served two terms as Wisconsin governor, unseated a Republican incumbent in a 2002 midterm election. And Doyle won re-election in 2006. Our rating Matthews said Johnson won in a "very low turnout" election when he knocked off Feingold in 2010. His comment holds up if the comparison point is presidential years, but it’s off the mark if prior midterms in Wisconsin and in other states are the standard. We rate his statement Half True. | null | Chris Matthews | null | null | null | 2013-02-10T09:00:00 | 2013-01-23 | ['United_States'] |
vogo-00333 | Update: Police Now Tweet | none | https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/blackout/update-police-now-tweet/ | null | null | null | null | null | Update: Police Now Tweet | September 14, 2011 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00342 | A video shows a German newscaster laughing at President Trump's statements at a NATO summit. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-news-trump-nato/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Is This How German News Covered President Trump at the NATO Summit? | 16 July 2018 | null | ['Germany', 'NATO'] |
snes-04401 | Security improvements to the White House fence in 2015 included the introduction of Islamic symbolism to the design. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-fence-islamic-symbols/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | Islamic Symbols Added to White House Fence | 21 July 2016 | null | ['Islam', 'White_House'] |
hoer-00014 | Isis Door Knocking Warning Message | bogus warning | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/isis-marking-christian-homes-false-rumour.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Isis Door Knocking Warning Message is a Hoax | September 29, 2014 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09535 | Houston is "the third-most toxic city in the United States of America." | true | /texas/statements/2010/feb/09/farouk-shami/farouk-shami-says-houston-no-3-toxicity-nation/ | Houston businessman Farouk Shami, running for governor, turned to his leading Democratic foe on Monday night and leveled a foul charge. In a televised debate, Shami told Bill White, the former Houston mayor: "Our city is the third-most toxic city in the United States of America." White didn’t take issue with Shami’s description, but it was news to us. We decided to check into the Bayou City’s "ick" ranking. Shami’s campaign said the candidate based his statement on a 2009 article in Forbes magazine putting Houston behind only Atlanta and Detroit for toxicity among major U.S. cities. The magazine said it based its rankings of the nation’s 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas on data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "We counted the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment," the magazine said, "the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the number of times the EPA has responded to reports of a potentially hazardous environmental incident or site in each metro area's principal city." Its article states Houston's residents live with with air that's far filthier than it should be. "Facilities in Houston released 88.7 million pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment in 2007," the magazine says, "and the former site of a methanol fire and chemical explosion number among the city's 50 sites necessitating an EPA response. Factories that serve the local petrochemical industry emit benzene and 1-3 butabeine, toxins proven to be particularly harmful, that the area's intense sunlight and lack of wind keep trapped in the local area's atmosphere." Jim Lester, vice president of the Houston Advanced Research Center, a Woodlands-based nonprofit group that studies and promotes sustainable development, is quoted saying Houston has become "one of the favorite places in the world for doing air-quality science." He saw that as a boon: "The more people understand about it (air quality), the more changes are likely that will take us in a positive direction." When we reached Lester, he revisited pollution levels reported by industries and posted online by the EPA. In 2007, Harris County industries reported either releasing or disposing of 36.1 million pounds of toxic chemicals, while industries around Detroit in Wayne County nearly matched that dubious achievement, reporting the disposal or release of nearly 30 million pounds of toxic pollutants. Shami correctly referred to a recent national comparison. We rate his statement as True. | null | Farouk Shami | null | null | null | 2010-02-09T17:45:11 | 2010-02-08 | ['United_States', 'Houston'] |
hoer-00691 | Crop Art - Rice Fields of Japan | true messages | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/japanese-rice-crop-art.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Crop Art - Rice Fields of Japan | 27th April 2011 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02796 | Back door gun control is in full effect in the United States due to "Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency." | pants on fire! | /florida/statements/2013/dec/03/allen-west/allen-west-blames-obamas-epa-closing-smelter-evide/ | Former Congressman Allen West has taken aim at a surprising gun control villain: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "It seems that back door gun control is in full effect in the United States. Why? Thanks to Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), we can no longer smelt lead from ore in the United States. ...," wrote the Republican and retired Army lieutenant colonel on his website Dec. 1. "So America, back door gun control is moving forward and while we are all distracted with Obamacare and Iran nuclear negotiations, our Second Amendment rights are undergoing an assault by clandestine infiltration." Here’s West’s explanation in a nutshell: The Doe Run lead smelter in Herculaneum, Missouri will close its doors this month due to air quality restrictions. "What this all means," West wrote, "is that after December 2013, any ammunition that will be available to US citizens will have to be imported, which will surely increase the price and possibly come under government control." Is West correct to conclude that the EPA’s actions are "back door gun control"? A reader asked us to check West’s claim, so we did. (A hat tip to the Blaze, which published its own fact-check between the time we spotted West’s claim and the time we published it.) Lead’s dangers Lead is a serious health hazard. According to the Mayo Clinic, "even small amounts of lead can cause serious health problems. Children under the age of 6 are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can severely affect mental and physical development. At very high levels, lead poisoning can be fatal." Lead contamination can be found in air, water and soil as well as homes from old paint. Lead-based paint and lead-contaminated dust in older buildings are the most common sources of lead poisoning in children. Adults who work with batteries, home renovations or in auto repair shops also may be exposed to lead. The health dangers prompted the U.S. to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1980s. As Doe Run announced at the time, the company reached a settlement with the EPA and the state of Missouri in 2010 which included paying fines and ceasing smelting operations in Herculaneum. But the news is gaining fresh attention now because the actual closure date of Dec. 31 is looming. West’s blog cited an Oct. 29 post by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton on noisyroom.net which slammed the feds for "back door gun control" in driving the plant to closure. (The Blaze reported that West’s initial post failed to cite noisyroom but later updated with attribution.) Monroe-Hamilton sent us to a post she wrote Dec. 3 in response to the controversy, in which she said what she wrote was an "opinion piece." But the long history of lead-control efforts casts serious doubt on the idea that the closure was driven by anti-gun concerns. Ever since the EPA was created in 1970, one of its missions has been to limit pollution from smelters which are "terribly toxic sites," said David Rosner, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University who studies the politics of pollution. The Doe Run smelter, he says, was shut down because it was a major polluter -- not as a way of curbing guns. "It had nothing to do with gun control or bullets," Rosner told PolitiFact. "The idea of linking this to an issue of gun control or a surreptitious way for the government trying to shut down the gun industry is nuts. This was an EPA decision because of children who were being poisoned by what had come out of that plant." While West, who represented South Florida for one term, pointed the finger at "Obama’s" EPA, the EPA’s case against Doe Run actually began decades ago. The St. Louis area failed to meet federal clean air standards for lead in 1987 -- during the Reagan administration -- due to emissions from the smelter, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in 1989. Reagan wasn't the only Republican president to advance the anti-lead effort. In 2008, under President George W. Bush, the EPA adopted tougher air quality standards for lead that were 10 times more stringent than the past. In 2010, the EPA reached a settlement with Doe Run. In November, Doe Run issued a news release about the closure: "Although the United States is home to a number of secondary lead smelters, which recycle lead from various sources, the Herculaneum facility is the last primary lead smelter in the United States," according to the release. The release explains that the company isn’t shutting down entirely. While the company is closing its primary smelter, which extracts lead from ore, it will continue to operate as a secondary lead smelter -- essentially a recycler for lead contained in other products. According to the company, more than 80 percent of all lead produced in the United States is used in either vehicle batteries or in stationary batteries for backup power used by the military and in telecommunications and medical applications."In the U.S., the recycle rate of these batteries is approximately 98 percent, making lead-based batteries the most highly recycled consumer product," the company release said. "These batteries are recycled at secondary lead smelters. We own such a smelter in southern Missouri." The company added that lead is used in ammunition and other materials. Doe Run spokeswoman Tammy Stankey emailed PolitiFact to say that the company "will continue to supply our ammo customers using secondary lead." We interviewed experts on lead or ammunition to ask about the impact of the plant closure. Most said there should not be major concerns. Michael Bazinet, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, confirmed that lead used for ammunition made in the U.S. comes almost exclusively from recycled sources. "While no one should ever be pleased about the closure of any industry, in this case there should not be a noticeable effect on consumers. ... We should not see any effect on the civilian marketplace," Bazinet told PolitiFact. The foundation’s general counsel, Lawrence Keane, echoed that view in an interview with the Washington Times Others agree. While Doe Run is the last "primary" lead smelter in the U.S. there are plenty of "secondary" processing of lead in the U.S., Richard Lowden, a research engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory told PolitiFact in an email. "Primary lead is of higher purity and is needed for specialty applications such as unique types of lead-acid batteries," Lowden said. "Secondary lead is slightly less pure and is used in most applications -- over 80 percent of domestic consumption, including bullets. The U.S. imports very little lead, with the main foreign sources being Canada and Mexico. I do not believe shooters have to worry about a source of lead for bullets." Florida Bullet, a Clearwater-based company that supplies ammunition to most law enforcement agencies in Florida, isn’t worried about the smelter’s closure. The bullets the company sells, made by Federal and Speer, "use reclaimed lead, so this is not going to bother us as far as production goes," said the company’s president, Tom Falone. "We don’t foresee this being a problem for us." When we asked Michele Hickford, West’s spokeswoman, why he blamed Obama if the EPA had zeroed in on the smelter long before Obama was president, she said, "The plant closed under Obama. Regardless of what this lead plant is used for, the EPA net is tightening on the entire industry, and if you follow it to its logical conclusion, the industry will be shut down eventually. This is yet another example of the Obama administration circumventing the legislative process to achieve its goals." Our ruling West wrote that "back door gun control is in full effect in the United States" due "to Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency." But there is no evidence that it was a clandestine effort at back door gun control. Rather, the EPA’s settlement with Doe Run -- which concluded a case that began years before Obama was elected president -- had to do with emissions of a chemical that can cause serious injury and death to adults and children. And ammunition experts shot massive holes in the notion that the smelter’s closure would cut production, reduce supply or raise the cost of ammunition. Pants on Fire! | null | Allen West | null | null | null | 2013-12-03T16:44:42 | 2013-12-02 | ['United_States', 'Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-04230 | Our welfare system now consumes 42 percent of our budget. | half-true | /rhode-island/statements/2012/nov/25/patricia-morgan/ri-state-rep-patricia-morgan-says-spending-welfare/ | The classic conflict that underlies many political debates these days is how to balance what we wish government would do for us with how much we can afford to pay for those government services. One of those who worries our good intentions may be getting too big for our wallets is state Rep. Patricia L. Morgan, R-West Warwick, who won reelection this month to her second term. A reader sent us one of her campaign fliers last week, asking us to check one of its claims. The headline on the flier was "Waste and Abuse in Rhode Island Government is hurting our JOB Climate and YOU. Is it Fair?" The claim that caught our reader’s eye: "Our welfare system now consumes more than 42 percent of our budget." The flier said such spending was diverting funds that could otherwise be spent on roads, higher education and improving the economic climate for private business. We wondered what Morgan’s definition of the "welfare system" was and whether it really made up 42 percent of the budget. When we called Morgan she said she defines welfare as a payment from the government that someone gets without having to work to earn it. That would cover food stamps, free or subsidized childcare, subsidized housing, even the RIPTA bus passes given to participants in Rhode Island IWorks, the welfare and job training program for low-income families, she said. She said she didn’t do an exhaustive breakdown of all state agencies to arrive at her 42 percent figure. Instead, she used the state House of Representatives fiscal staff’s evaluation of the fiscal 2013 budget as enacted. She said she took the $3.66 billion the staff calculated the state is set to spend on "assistance, grants and benefits" in 2013 and divided it by the total budget of state and federal spending, around $8.09 billion. "Assistance, grants and benefits" made up 45.2 percent of the budget. We decided to take a deeper look to see whether Morgan’s number and analysis was on target. But first, let’s talk about Morgan’s definition of "welfare system." When many people hear the term, they might think of welfare payments to poor people -- now known as Rhode Island Works. But other programs provide types of direct payments too, such as General Public Assistance, Supplemental Security Income and Individual and Family Support. Combined, those are slated to cost about $562 million in 2013, about 7 percent of the total state budget. But for purposes of this item, we’ll work with Morgan’s broader definition of welfare as any government payment to an individual. The House analysis of the budget notes that while most of the $3.6-billion figure Morgan cited is made up of social service aid, it also includes "grants to environmental agencies, local law enforcement agencies." State Budget Director Thomas Mullaney told us that, in fact, the "assistance, grants and benefits" category includes every grant from every department. That would include such spending as Federal Emergency Management Agency payments for storm cleanups as well as the legislative grants representatives and senators give out to such groups as Little League teams in their districts. The House staff analysis actually broke out what it classified as human service-related assistance, grants and benefits -- closer to Morgan’s definition of "welfare system." They totaled $2.54 billion, or about 31 percent of the total state 2013 budget -- lower than Morgan’s figures. More than half of that, $1.6 billion, was federal money spent on providing Medicaid services to Rhode Island’s poor. What about the costs for administering these programs? Morgan said the House report says overall, all spending for human services -- including administration -- totals about $3.19 billion, or about 39.3 percent of the budget. Even though some of that money wasn’t going directly to beneficiaries, she said it counted because it was the expense of delivering those benefits. But that figure includes spending on departments that don’t make payments to individuals, including the Department of Health, the state medical examiner’s office, the Office of Child Advocate and the Office of Child Support Enforcement, which last year helped collect about $80 million in child support owed by deadbeat parents. We believe the 31 percent figure is more applicable Our ruling State Rep. Patricia Morgan says spending on "welfare systems" in Rhode Island accounts for 42 percent of the budget. Even working with Morgan's broad definition of welfare, our analysis showed that figure is closer to 31 percent. Why does this matter? As Morgan’s flier noted, social-service programs, particularly Medicaid, are clearly putting an increasing strain on state and federal taxpayers. That’s a big challenge for lawmakers. It’s important to get the numbers right. We rule Morgan's statement Half True. | null | Patricia Morgan | null | null | null | 2012-11-25T00:01:00 | 2012-11-06 | ['None'] |
goop-00197 | Jennifer Aniston Jealous Of Brad Pitt’s Co-Star Margaret Qualley? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-margaret-qualley/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Jennifer Aniston Jealous Of Brad Pitt’s Co-Star Margaret Qualley? | 1:21 pm, October 1, 2018 | null | ['Brad_Pitt', 'Jennifer_Aniston'] |
faan-00112 | “Income splitting … will cost the federal government a whopping two billion dollars a year.” | factscan score: true | http://factscan.ca/justin-trudeau-income-splitting-will-cost-the-federal-government-a-whopping-two-billion-dollars-a-year/ | True. Initial estimates peg the cost of income splitting between $2.5 and $2.9 billion, however more recent research estimates a cost of roughly $2 billion per year. | null | Justin Trudeau | null | null | null | 2015-02-16 | mber 10, 2014 | ['None'] |
goop-01608 | Liam Payne, Cheryl Split? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/liam-payne-cheryl-split-breakup-not-true/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Liam Payne, Cheryl Split? | 11:00 pm, February 9, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
huca-00019 | "The issue around budgets, of course, is it's the House of Commons that votes on budgetary measures, and the Senate is, of course, welcome to look at it and make recommendations. But the legitimacy happens from the House of Commons on this." | some baloney | https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/06/29/trudeaus-claim-about-senates-right-to-amend-budget-bills-conta_a_23008018/?utm_hp_ref=ca-baloney-meter | null | null | Prime Minister Justin Trudeau | Joan Bryden | null | Trudeau's Claim About Senate's Right To Amend Budget Bills Contains 'Some Baloney' | 06/29/2017 10:08 EDT | welcome to look at it and make recommendations. But the legitimacy happens from the House of Commons on this." | ['None'] |
hoer-00452 | Clint Eastwood is Moving To Amarillo, Texas | statirical reports | http://www.hoax-slayer.net/clint-eastwood-is-not-moving-to-amarillo-texas/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Clint Eastwood is NOT Moving To Amarillo, Texas | March 23, 2016 | null | ['Amarillo,_Texas', 'Clint_Eastwood', 'Texas'] |
farg-00418 | CNN To Permanently Close Its Doors As Ratings Plunge 30 Percent | false | https://www.factcheck.org/2018/05/cnn-not-shutting-down/ | null | fake-news | FactCheck.org | Angelo Fichera | ['CNN', 'cable news'] | CNN Not Shutting Down | May 25, 2018 | 2018-05-25 19:21:19 UTC | ['None'] |
pomt-14793 | It is already in the law that there is a requirement to screen (refugees) for religion. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/dec/01/jeb-bush/bush-says-law-requires-religious-screening/ | The probability that terrorists would try to take advantage of the refugee wave landing in Europe has led many Republicans and some Democrats to call for tighter policies here at home. Republican candidate Jeb Bush has rejected one of the more hard-line proposals that would ban all Syrian Muslim refugees from entering the United States. But Bush has said that America ought to give priority to Christians fleeing the ravages of religious militants under the command of the Islamic State. Asked on CBS News’ Face the Nation if a Christian preference wouldn’t play into the ISIL narrative that their war was a struggle between Islam and Christianity, Bush said this wouldn’t represent any real change. "It is already in the law that there is a requirement to screen for religion," Bush said Nov. 29, 2015. "This is the practice of our country. There was a bipartisan bill that of course didn't pass in Congress this year to provide preference for Christians who are being slaughtered in the Middle East, persecuted based on their faith. Religious minorities, I think, should have some preference." We decided to look at whether American officials are legally bound to ask refugees about their religion. The short answer is, it depends. If a refugee says he or she fears religious persecution, then their religion absorbs a lot of time in the interview process. But if their fear stems from their political views, then there is no obligation to ask about their religion. Still, experts said it is standard practice to ask refugees about their religion, even if they are not specifically escaping religious persecution. The Bush press office pointed us to an opinion piece in the National Review that paraphrased the relevant part of the Immigration and Nationality Act (section 101(a)(42)) this way: "An alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant." The full list of possible grounds for persecution includes "race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." A State Department spokesperson told PolitiFact that there is no legal requirement for refugees to indicate a religious preference. But if they make religion the basis of their claim, then many questions about their religious background follow. In some particular cases, the State Department designates certain groups as ones of "special humanitarian concern" and in the past, religion has helped define such groups. Examples include Soviet Jews and Iranian religious minorities. For those special groups, religion is an essential aspect of the person’s background, said Mark Hetfield, president of HIAS, a refugee assistance group that began over a century ago to help Jews fleeing Eastern Europe. (HIAS today works with people of any faith from around the world and has worked with both the UN and the State Department to help refugees.) "But this is not due to a legal requirement," he said. "This is to see if they fit in the parameters of the program." A standard practice Most refugees begin their formal path to resettlement with an interview conducted by staff of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. If a person is headed toward the United States, their next stop is a Resettlement Support Center overseen by the U.S. State Department. According to the department’s press office, the resettlement centers routinely ask about religion. Hetfield affirmed that. "There is a data field for religion which is always filled in," he said. "If it is not directly relevant to the claim, U.S Citizenship and Immigration (staff) won't ask about it, but it will be in the applicant's file." We reached Bill Frelick, director of the refugee rights program at Human Rights Watch, when he was in Bulgaria interviewing Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers. Frelick said religious affiliation is a typical but optional question for refugees. The practitioners we reached found Bush’s emphasis on the legal dimension of asking about religion problematic. To them, simply asking is not screening. It provides information that might ease a refugee’s transition to life in America and finding a place of worship. Screening in the sense of vetting takes place only when the refugee says he or she fears religious persecution. Refugees are tracked based on the countries they have fled, not their religion, so we don’t know the fraction of refugees claiming religious persecution. Anecdotally, religion plays a role in many refugee applications in the Middle East, whether the person is Sunni or Shia Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Baha'i, or some other faith. Our ruling Bush said that there is a legal requirement to screen for religion. U.S. immigration law does state that American officials must dig into a person’s religion if their refugee status is based on a fear of religious persecution. However, there is no formal requirement if the person bases the claim on other grounds. In practice, questions about religion are common even if they are not required. His statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True. | null | Jeb Bush | null | null | null | 2015-12-01T17:54:04 | 2015-11-29 | ['None'] |
vees-00226 | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Kuwait DID get on its knees to ask forgiveness from Duterte after diplomatic row | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-kuwait-did-not-get-its-knees-ask-forgi | null | null | null | null | fake news,kuwait | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Kuwait DID NOT get on its knees to ask forgiveness from Duterte after diplomatic row | May 03, 2018 | null | ['Kuwait'] |
snes-01460 | The Southern Baptist Convention has offered to pay for the funeral costs of any victim of the Sutherland Springs, Texas mass shooting. | true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/southern-baptist-convention-funeral-costs-sutherland-springs/ | null | Religion | null | Alex Kasprak | null | Is The Southern Baptist Convention Covering Funeral Costs for Sutherland Springs Victims? | 8 November 2017 | null | ['Texas'] |
bove-00146 | CLAIM: Saudi Arabia Beheads First Female Robot Citizen | rating: false | https://www.boomlive.in/fake-news-saudi-arabia-did-not-behead-its-first-female-robot-citizen/ | FACT: Duffel Blog, the website that published the story, is a satirical or parody website in the U.S. It is also known as the military version of ‘The Onion’. | null | null | null | null | FAKE NEWS: Saudi Arabia Did Not Behead Its First Female Robot Citizen | Nov 11 2017 9:12 am, Last Updated: Nov 17 2017 6:28 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02062 | From 2000 to 2008, we averaged "about five mass shootings a year. We're now averaging 15. So that's a three-fold increase." | mostly false | /punditfact/statements/2014/may/28/pierre-thomas/abcs-thomas-mass-shootings-have-tripled-2000/ | The brutal murders May 23, 2014, near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, dominated the national news and provoked a lot of talk about what could have been done to save the lives of six young college-aged victims. The public quickly learned the basics. The killer had a history of mental illness. He revealed his plans in a YouTube video posted shortly before his rampage. He killed his first three victims, his roommates, with a knife. He legally owned three handguns and used at least one of them to kill three strangers before committing suicide. In a search for some pattern, ABC’s This Week host, Martha Raddatz asked ABC senior justice correspondent Pierre Thomas about deadly gunfire on or near college campuses since 1996. "Officials you talk to say there really is a spike nationwide," Raddatz said. "The problem is, it's even bigger than that," Thomas said. "Between 2008 and 2000 roughly, we were averaging about five mass shootings a year. We're now averaging 15. So that's a three-fold increase." That seemed like a major jump. Does the country really have three times as many mass shootings? We decided to take a closer look. We reached out to Thomas to learn what background information he was using and did not hear back. However, we found an FBI study that, while it ultimately doesn’t support his claim, does offer some numbers that sound very much like the ones Thomas used. Pete Blair, director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University was the lead researcher on the study Active Shooter Events from 2000 to 2012. Blair found that from 2000 to 2008, there were about five events each year where someone with a gun attempted to kill multiple people. But after 2008 there were nearly 16 each year. That matches the tripling that Thomas described. The problem is, Thomas talked about mass shootings. That’s not the violence Blair studied. In about 20 percent the cases Blair looked at, no one died. In more than 10 percent of the cases, only one person was killed. Neither scenario meets the definition of a mass shooting. Blair explained that the FBI’s focus was on crafting strategies to save lives once a gunman arrives. "Active shooter is a response protocol for the police," Blair said. "We believe that we can learn as much from events that do not turn into mass killings as those that do." Blair found that about half the time, the incidents are over before police arrive and the most common reason is that the shooter commits suicide. In research circles, there is no hard and fast definition for a mass shooting. Instead, the FBI uses the term "mass murder" when four or more people are killed in what is essentially a single episode. By that definition, Blair said there has been no increase in mass shootings. James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, told PunditFact the rate of mass murders has held steady for decades. "Since 1976, we’ve averaged about 20 cases a year," Fox said. "On average, about 100 people a year are killed by mass murderers." The data on killings is fraught with analytic pitfalls. USA Today researchers found that the FBI’s homicide data is accurate only about 60 percent of the time. On top of that, different studies look at different kinds of events. For example, Fox includes killings within families and murders committed during burglaries in his tally. In contrast, the magazine Mother Jones did an extensive investigation that aimed to identify instances where at least four people were murdered and the motive was indiscriminate killing in a public setting. Researchers eliminated cases where the violence took place in a home or was tied to a robbery or gang warfare. (Those standards might exclude the Santa Barbara slayings because three of the victims were the killer’s roommates and were slain in their apartment. Nor would it be correct to call them shootings because they were stabbed to death.) Using its approach, Mother Jones found that the rate of these killings has gone up over time. During the period 2000 to 2008, there were 1.8 mass murders a year. From 2009 to 2013, the rate doubled to 3.6 events per year. This shows an increase, but not as large as Thomas suggested. There’s another way to slice the data. Criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University went beyond homicides and focused on any event in which seven or more people were killed or injured in a single location. By his tally, the yearly average between 2000 and 2008 was 2.4 events, compared to 5 events per year after 2008. This offers some support for Thomas’s statement but again, the numbers are quite different from the ones he used. Our ruling Thomas said that mass shootings have tripled since the 2000 to 2008 period and the country now sees about 15 episodes a year. The study that matches those figures looked at a different form of violence and included instances where no one was murdered. The study’s author told us that mass murders, as defined by the FBI, have not increased. Using a more narrow definition, Mother Jones found that the country now has between three and four mass killings a year, a doubling since about a decade ago. Another study that looked at the number of people wounded, not necessarily killed, offered similar results. The annual rate is much lower than Thomas said and the change in the rate is also considerably less. There is some evidence that mass killings have increased but that finding hinges on a careful choice of incidents, and by any measure, Thomas’ numbers are way off. We rate his claim Mostly False. | null | Pierre Thomas | null | null | null | 2014-05-28T14:24:19 | 2014-05-25 | ['None'] |
goop-02227 | Miranda Lambert, Anderson East CMA Awards Red Carpet Appearance “Shocking,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/miranda-lambert-cma-awards-anderson-east-red-carpet-cmas-2017/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Miranda Lambert, Anderson East CMA Awards Red Carpet Appearance NOT “Shocking,” Despite Claim | 12:46 pm, November 9, 2017 | null | ['Miranda_Lambert'] |
goop-00950 | Is Khloe Kardashian Banned From Cleveland Cavaliers Games? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/khloe-kardashian-banned-cleveland-cavaliers-games-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Is Khloe Kardashian Banned From Cleveland Cavaliers Games? | 5:30 pm, May 23, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-00374 | Immigrant children separated from their parents and held in detention centers around the country are required in some cases to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. | mixture | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/detained-children-pledge-of-allegiance/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | Are Detained Immigrant Children Required to Recite the Pledge of Allegiance? | 5 July 2018 | null | ['None'] |
chct-00324 | FACT CHECK: Do 92% Of Americans Support DACA? | verdict: false | http://checkyourfact.com/2017/09/15/fact-check-do-92-of-americans-support-daca/ | null | null | null | David Sivak | Fact Check Editor | null | null | 4:04 PM 09/15/2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-03136 | Studies have shown that voter fraud is non-existent in Texas. | false | /texas/statements/2013/sep/13/eddie-bernice-johnson/voter-fraud-occurs-texas-though-convictions-and-gu/ | Texas’ attorney general, Greg Abbott, has his facts wrong on the voting process, U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson said in an opinion column published Aug. 8, 2013, in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. For example, "Abbott advocates the use of voter ID laws, allegedly to stop voter fraud," the Dallas Democrat wrote. "Studies have shown that voter fraud is non-existent in Texas." "Non-existent" is pretty strong; we don’t have to look any farther than our own reporting to know that statement isn’t entirely accurate. But how prevalent is voter fraud in Texas? Johnson spokesman Cameron Trimble told us by phone and email that the column should have said "virtually" non-existent. He sent us web links to research and news stories that described nationwide voter fraud as rare. None of the materials analyzed fraud in Texas specifically, and we found only one mention of a Texas case -- the 2006 conviction of a Pecos woman who filled out and mailed absentee ballots for others. Trimble’s sources mostly referred to voter fraud -- deception committed by individual voters, such as voting more than once, impersonating a voter or voting despite ineligibility -- rather than overall election fraud, which encompasses actions by others, such as election officials or campaign workers, who break election laws in ways that could include intimidating voters, publishing misinformation about polling places or possessing ballots not their own. We dipped into that distinction in an April 2012 fact-check that rated as Half True a claim from Abbott that he had secured 50 convictions for election fraud. Abbott’s basis was his office’s records on 2002-12 prosecutions for alleged election code violations. For this fact-check, we asked Abbott’s office for an updated list. County district attorneys and the Texas secretary of state’s elections division usually refer allegations of election code violations to the attorney general. We also called the secretary’s office and several district attorney offices around the state, but found no specific information about how many violations were reported or prosecuted. Abbott spokeswoman Lauren Bean emailed us records showing that from August 2002 through September 2012, the office received 616 allegations of election-code violations and recorded 78 election-code prosecutions. By our count, 46 of the prosecutions ended with a conviction, guilty plea, no-contest plea or guilty plea as part of deferred adjudication. Of those, 18 cases appeared to involve fraud committed by individual voters: 12 cases with ineligible voters, five cases of voter impersonation and one case of voting more than once. So, by our reading of the attorney general’s records, 18 instances of voter fraud have been confirmed in Texas since 2002. In 2012, the News21 investigative project headquartered at Arizona State University’s journalism school compiled a database that showed 104 Texas cases of alleged election fraud among 2,068 nationwide since 2000. The News21 students, who published their results online Aug. 12, 2012, gathered allegations through public information requests, news accounts and court records. According to the project’s website, they included all cases "that had reached some level of official action: That is, someone was charged, an investigation was opened, a specific accusation was made against a named person." News21 determined that 37 of the 104 Texas allegations were made against voters. Most of the cases were still pending at the time the students published their project in 2012, but 15 had resulted in a guilty plea or conviction, according to the database. Our ruling Johnson said, "Studies have shown that voter fraud is non-existent in Texas." She did not provide, nor did we find, studies showing such fraud to be non-existent. To the contrary, Abbott’s records show 18 convictions, no-contest pleas or guilty pleas on voter fraud charges from 2002 through 2012. That’s not a lot of fraud, by any means, but it still evidently occurred. Johnson might have meant to say "virtually non-existent," but the Truth-O-Meter holds individuals accountable for what they actually say. We rate this statement as False. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ FALSE – The statement is not accurate. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. | null | Eddie Bernice Johnson | null | null | null | 2013-09-13T18:06:39 | 2013-08-08 | ['Texas'] |
pomt-05942 | Says Ohio has 77 job training programs spread across 13 state agencies. | true | /ohio/statements/2012/jan/27/john-kasich/john-kasich-says-ohio-has-77-job-training-programs/ | Gov. John Kasich says job training programs will be his seminal issue of 2012. But as Ohio continues to push for new jobs and retaining the ones it has, a problem has emerged. Employers say Ohio has too few skilled workers, which in turn makes companies leery about moving their business here from outside the state. The governor doesn’t dispute that notion completely, but asserts that Ohio is trying. Ohio currently has 77 workforce job training programs across 13 state agencies, Kasich said Jan. 10, 2012, in a boardroom interview with editors at The Plain Dealer. Kasich views that as a weak spot in the state’s economic development plans and wants to reorganize the programs. Politifact Ohio double-checked to see if the governor had his figures correct. According to the state, to be defined as a state workforce training program the service has to: Receive state and/or federal resources to operate; Help people identify, prepare or attain employment or assist and employer with training or retaining its workforce; and Not be a program used by a state agency to train its own staff. By that criteria, the state has exactly 77 workforce training programs, according to the Ohio Department of Development. The programs are spread across 13 state entities: Board or Regents Department of Aging Department of Alcohol and Addictive Services Department of Commerce Department of Development Department of Education Department of Health Department of Jobs and Family Services Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Rehabilitative Services Commission Department of Transportation Department of Veteran Services Department of Youth Services Some, for example, at the Board of Regents, are college scholarship programs but are considered workforce development because they assist students with pursuing education degrees in certain high need fields, like nursing, science or math. To put the governor’s thoughts in sharper focus, while Ohio has a wealth of workforce training programs, Kasich doesn’t think much of the state’s efforts or efficiency in linking participants in these programs to actual jobs. "If you have 77 and 13 it means you have zero. That’s how I add that up," Kasich told The Plain Dealer. "Nobody knows what anyone’s doing." The point the governor is arguing is that the state does not have a strategic plan for how to address workforce training, instead it has a bunch of individual programs working in isolation. The administration is working to change that approach. Our point here is not to argue which job training approach is best, but rather to check the governor’s claim that there are 77 programs spread through 13 agencies. On the Truth-O-Meter, we rate the governor’s comment as True. | null | John Kasich | null | null | null | 2012-01-27T06:00:00 | 2012-01-10 | ['None'] |
pomt-06523 | Senate Bill 5 makes it harder for nurses to give the patients the quality care they need. | mostly false | /ohio/statements/2011/oct/10/we-are-ohio/we-are-ohio-claims-sb-5-would/ | We Are Ohio, the main group trying to repeal Ohio Senate Bill 5, recently rolled out a TV commercial warning voters that upholding the law would compromise the health care nurses can provide. The message is similar to a claim in a previous ad that SB 5 would make it illegal to negotiate for enough firefighters to do the job. PolitiFact Ohio rated that claim Mostly True. "Senate Bill 5 makes it harder for nurses to give the patients the quality care they need," a nurse identified as Shawna Turner says in the commercial. SB 5 – the state’s new collective bargaining law that is strongly opposed by unions and Democrats – will reduce public workers’ negotiating power, ban public-worker strikes and eliminate binding arbitration. The bill also would force public workers to pay at least 15 percent of their health insurance costs and to pay at least 10 percent of pay toward pension contributions. The SB 5 referendum will appear on the Nov. 8 ballot as Issue 2. A "yes" vote would go toward upholding the law and a "no" vote would be for its repeal. The commercial, which began airing on Sept. 27, raises questions about how SB 5 impacts nurses – a group of workers less commonly associated with SB 5 than others, such as police officers and teachers. PolitiFact Ohio decided to check the ad’s claim. We started by checking how many nurses belong to public unions and, therefore, will be affected by SB 5. There are about 160,000 registered nurses in the state and between 6,000 and 10,000 of those are public employees, according to the Ohio Nurses Association. That means SB 5 would affect between 4 percent and 6.25 percent of Ohio nurses. The Ohio Nurses Association represents about 3,000 public-sector nurses, chief executive officer Gingy Harshey-Meade said. The Ohio Civil Service Employees Association and the Service Employees International Union also represent Ohio nurses. These nurses work at places such as prisons, city or county hospitals and public health departments. When the nurse in the commercial says the new law will make it harder for nurses to provide care, the following text appears on the screen: "Source: Senate Bill 5; p229, Section 4117.08 (B)." That section of the law specifies a handful of subjects that cannot be collectively bargained. Among those topics is "the number of employees required to be on duty or employed in any department." In an email, We Are Ohio spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas said the restriction on bargaining staffing relates to patient care because "it is more difficult for a nurse to provide quality care when he/she is working short-staffed." Jason Mauk, spokesman for the pro-SB 5 group Building a Better Ohio, sought to minimize the idea that SB 5 bans workers from negotiating staffing. He said management can discuss the issue if it chooses. As evidence, he has pointed to a different provision in SB 5 that lists "the number of persons required to be employed or laid off" under topics that can be negotiated at management’s discretion. It is unclear how this provision would mesh with the ban cited in We Are Ohio’s commercials about nurses and firefighters. Certainly, however, management has no obligation to discuss staffing and unions do not have the right to collectively bargain the issue. The current collective bargaining agreement that covers Turner, the nurse featured in the commercial, gives some insight into how SB 5 would affect nurses working conditions. Turner, who works at the Ohio State University Ross Heart Hospital, is represented by the Ohio Nurses Association. The union’s contract with the university contains a clause that gives management the right to set staffing levels. ONA’s contract with OSU says management has the right "to determine staffing and staffing patterns including, but not limited to the assignment of nurses as to the numbers employed, duties to be performed, qualifications required, and areas worked." That sounds a lot like the rule that SB 5 would impose. But union officials say the same contract that gives OSU the right to make staffing decisions, for example, also gives the union a significant voice in those decisions. Kelly Trautner, deputy executive officer of the Ohio Nurses Association, pointed to a provision in ONA’s contract with Ohio State that requires meetings between the union and management to discuss "matters of mutual concern." Trautner said there are other provisions, too, that give the union the right to discuss staffing. But SB 5 completely removes that right and erases the provisions in past contracts that provide the union a voice in staffing matters, Trautner said. So what about the claim that S.B. 5 make it harder for nurses to give patients quality care? The claim contains an element of truth. The power SB 5 gives to management for staffing decisions is significant – especially when you consider past clauses in collective bargaining agreements that empowered workers to speak up for staffing concerns will not carry over to new contracts if SB 5 takes effect. The argument there is that a reduced staff makes it harder to give quality care. But there are some critical facts on which the ad is silent. First, it is impossible to say whether public employers will cut nursing staffs. The ad assumes that with staffing non-negotiable, management will cut staffs or not provide adequate staffing to a point that it will have an impact on the quality of care. That’s where this claim differs from the claim in the previous ad involving firefighters, which specifically focused on the inability to bargain over staffing. This claim goes one step further, saying it will make patient care harder to provide. Even more significantly, though, the commercial makes no distinction between nurses who are public employees and those who are non-public employees, and as such implies all nurses will suffer if Issue 2 passes. But only a tiny fraction of Ohio nurses are public employees - just four to six of every 100. A listener knowing those critical facts would have a different impression of the claim. On the Truth-O-Meter, the claim rates Mostly False. | null | We Are Ohio | null | null | null | 2011-10-10T06:00:00 | 2011-09-27 | ['None'] |
abbc-00434 | The claim: Tony Burke says he will ensure unaccompanied asylum seekers under the age of 18 have appropriate accommodation, services, and schooling in PNG | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-14/tony-burke-unaccompanied-children-png/4842978 | The claim: Tony Burke says he will ensure unaccompanied asylum seekers under the age of 18 have appropriate accommodation, services, and schooling in PNG | ['immigration', 'tony-burke', 'alp', 'federal-government', 'australia', 'papua-new-guinea'] | null | null | ['immigration', 'tony-burke', 'alp', 'federal-government', 'australia', 'papua-new-guinea'] | Tony Burke not telling the full story on unaccompanied asylum seeker children | Wed 21 Aug 2013, 8:24am | null | ['None'] |
bove-00212 | SC Bars Instant Talaq Not Triple Talaq: All You Need To Know About Muslim Divorces | none | https://www.boomlive.in/sc-bars-instant-talaq-not-triple-talaq-all-you-need-to-know-about-muslim-divorces/ | null | null | null | null | null | SC Bars Instant Talaq Not Triple Talaq: All You Need To Know About Muslim Divorces | Aug 22 2017 5:22 pm, Last Updated: Aug 22 2017 6:47 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-06679 | Sherrod Brown "has stood side by side" with President Barack Obama, presiding "over the most rapid increase in the debt over the last 2.5 years" and hurtling toward " the worst jobs record in the modern era." | half-true | /ohio/statements/2011/sep/08/national-republican-senatorial-committee/nrsc-blasts-brown-standing-obama-his-jobs-record-a/ | If the state of the nation is determined in any way by the president, those who stand with the president are destined to share credit or blame. Fair or not, that’s how political messages are being framed for the 2012 elections. We’ve see few better examples than what follows from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. After noting that U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio won office in 2006 saying he wanted to pursue sound economic policies, the Republican committee said in a news release on Aug. 23: "However, as Senator Brown has stood side-by-side with President Obama on virtually every major issue, including all of his major spending proposals, he and his fellow Democrats in Washington have presided over the most rapid increase in the debt over the last 2.5 years and they are on track to have the worst jobs record in the modern era." That’s a mouthful. Yet broken down into components, each part of the claim can be checked. And because this rap against Brown will be heard again and again over the next 14 months, PolitiFact Ohio thought it was worthwhile to do the checking now. So the components, in order: Brown "has stood side by side with President Obama on virtually every major issue, including all of his major spending proposals." Jahan Wilcox, a spokesman for the NRSC (an arm of the Republican Party), cited as major issues the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the economic stimulus bill; the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010; and the debt-hike bill of August 2011, which lifted the $14.3 trillion ceiling on government borrowing. Those certainly are big. Obama pushed for passage and Brown voted yes on each one, as did Senate and House majorities. Brown’s communications director, Meghan Dubyak, notes that the senator and president have disagreed on some big issues, too, such as carbon dioxide emission limits on factories and coal-burning power plants, a speedier withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and foreign trade. Were these major issues? Our dictionary (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate) defines major as greater in importance, or notable or conspicuous in effort and scope. The carbon caps were a significant issue in House of Representatives races last year in Ohio. But the stimulus and health care bill’s were Obama’s masterpieces, even if their final versions represented compromise. These, and the economy, have defined the Obama presidency. Brown "and his fellow Democrats have presided over the most rapid increase in the debt over the last 2.5 years." The debt has shot up from $10.626 trillion when Obama entered office to $14.622 trillion on Aug. 30, according to the Treasury Department’s "Debt to the Penny" database. In raw dollars, that $4 trillion increase is the most rapid rise in debt under any president, according to CBS News, which was one of the NRSC’s sources for the claim. Note the word "rapid," because it’s important here. Total debt during President George W. Bush’s presidency rose by $4.9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department, but that was over the course of eight years. Obama has been in office less than three years. But a dollar today is not worth what it was in, say, 1940, so we wondered about the rate of increase. We turned to the Office of Management and Budget’s historical debt tables and took out a calculator for additional perspective. Measured by rate of change, the gross federal debt has grown by 38 percent during the 2.5 years of Obama’s presidency. That is not a historical record Consider a one-year change during World War II, from the end of 1942 to the end of 1943: The gross debt rose 80 percent from $79.2 billion to $142.6 billion. It went up by another 43 percent the next year. That was debt from a world war, of course, an extraordinary time. Before moving on, it’s important to note one more piece of context. The NRSC did not say specifically that all the current debt was Obama’s and Brown’s fault. The statement was simply that Brown and fellow Democrats have "presided" over the rise, which the NRSC says means that Democrats voted to let the debt rise that high, approving debt-ceiling hikes like the controversial one that passed in August. Brown’s spokeswoman says she reads that to mean the NRSC is blaming Brown for the underlying policies and programs that drove up the debt, and we agree that the NRSC makes that implication. PolitiFact has noted a number of times that the Obama administration inherited debt from Bush, the result of major tax cuts, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a costly Medicare prescription drug benefit, and a recession. The debt then grew under Obama with the stimulus, the continuation of the wars and tax cuts, and an economy that still threatens to flat-line. Both parties say if only their policies were followed, the nation would ease out of this mess. We don’t claim universal wisdom but, as we have observed before, there’s blame and credit all around. Brown and Obama "are on track to have the worst jobs record in the modern era." There are several ways to weigh this claim. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, which the NRSC used, show job losses of 2.37 million from January 2009, the month Obama entered office, through July 2011, the most recently recorded month. But since Bush was still president for the first 19 days of January 2009, and the nation was already losing 600,000 to 800,000 jobs a month at that point, some claim it is fairer to start the measurement in February 2009, Obama’s first full month in office. That puts the job losses during Obama’s presidency so far at 1.64 million. Is this the worst in the modern era? The NRSC points to the Washington Post’s "Fact Checker" column for backup here. The Post weighed similar claims made by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry about Obama, and wrote, "When Romney made his statement, both Ronald Reagan and Obama were tied for the first two years of their presidency — a decline of about 2.3 percent in the number of people employed. The economy, however, really started to pick up in Reagan’s third year, while it has flagged under Obama, so for the first 2 ½ years, Obama’s record is now worse: a decline of about 1.4 percent under Obama, versus 0.5 percent under Reagan." The comparison can change with each successive month. But the NRSC allowed for some wiggle room by saying Obama and Brown are "on track" for a horrible jobs record. So is the NRSC right? As the Post noted, it is foolish to blame Obama for every one of those job losses, since the nation was already bleeding jobs when he got elected. We’ll go a step further: A single senator represents one vote out 100, and hardly has power to control job losses. He can, however, support policies, and sometimes his single vote matters. Brown cast a crucial final vote that allowed the stimulus bill to pass, returning to Washington on a White House-provided plane on Feb. 13, 2009, from visitation in advance of his mother’s next-day funeral. A number of economists say that as bad as the economy got, more jobs would have been lost had it not been for the stimulus. That is not to say all economists agree, nor is it to argue that Obama and Congress have or haven’t handled the economy effectively. It is merely noting a single senator’s role, since the NRSC assigns Brown blame. Going back to each part of the claim, then, the NRSC is correct on the highlights when it says Brown has stood side by side with Obama on virtually every major issue. But it overlooks energy -- a major issue in Ohio in 2010, though potentially less so in 2012, and one on which Brown took a different position than the president. It is correct in a narrow way when it says that Brown and Obama "presided" over the most rapid rise in debt in 2 ½ years, but that claim ignores much greater rises in the rate of growth during the 1940s, as well as the reason for some of the debt. As for being on track for the wost jobs record in the modern era, Obama may be headed for that ignominious distinction, but a single legislator generally lacks that kind of power. Put together, this compound claim leaves out important details and context. On the Truth-O-Meter, it merits a rating of Half True. | null | National Republican Senatorial Committee | null | null | null | 2011-09-08T06:00:00 | 2011-08-23 | ['None'] |
pomt-03331 | Dozens of artists, including Justin Timberlake, Jay Z and Rihanna, are canceling Florida shows like Stevie Wonder in protest of "stand your ground." | false | /florida/statements/2013/jul/23/instagram-posts/are-jay-z-justin-timberlake-and-rihanna-joining-st/ | Did you hear? Dozens of the world’s hottest musical acts are joining music legend Stevie Wonder in protest of Florida’s "stand your ground" law after the George Zimmerman trial, according to social networks and the blogosphere. Memes zooming through social media name two dozen artists that have canceled their tour dates in the Sunshine State indefinitely "UNTIL THE LAW IN FLORIDA IS ABOLISHED!" The list is populated with world-famous acts such as Justin Timberlake, Jay Z, Rihanna, Rod Stewart, Patti LaBelle, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, Alicia Keys, Usher, will.i.am, R. Kelly, Trey Songz, Mary J. Blige, Kanye West, Ciara, Kelly Rowland and other groups. Timberlake is singled out for nixing the kickoff of his tour in Miami because he refused "TO ENTERTAIN A STATE WHO’S GOVERNMENT ALLOWS PEOPLE TO SHOOT-N-KILL UN-ARMED TEENAGERS!" The PSA first caught PolitiFact Florida’s eye when it was shared in Instagram. Then the list got more attention when versions of it trickled into mainstream coverage. We are skeptical of chain emails and the like that are typed in ALL CAPS, contain misspellings and do not disclose their sources. The meme we’ve seen (which touts the misspelled names of RIHANA and ALISHIA KEYS as signing on) is a triple whammy. We decided to investigate whether dozens of high-profile acts are really joining Wonder and boycotting Florida. Our synopsis: Just because it’s in the news does not make it true. Adding names to Stevie Wonder's boycott Talk of Florida boycotts started July 14, the day after Zimmerman’s "not guilty" verdict in the death of Trayvon Martin. Wonder announced then in Quebec City that he will never again perform in Florida until the 2005 "stand your ground" law is abolished. He took it a step further: "As a matter of fact, wherever I find that law exists, I will not perform in that state or in that part of the world." (More than 20 other states have similar "stand your ground" laws.) Several musical artists and celebrities reacted to the verdict with anger and disbelief. Many gave musical tributes to Martin, including Beyoncé, Young Jeezy, Jay Z and Justin Timberlake, Patti LaBelle, Bruce Springsteen, and Wyclef Jean. But none of the artists on the Instagram list -- even those who have spoken out against the verdict -- publicly announced they are joining Wonder’s boycott. We checked social media accounts, websites and news reports and found no declarations of support for the boycott from the people on the list. Still, it wasn’t long before the story crossed over into news coverage. American Urban Radio Networks reporter April Ryan cited "sources close to Stevie Wonder camp" for her July 22 report that claimed a similar slate of artists are joining him in support of changing "stand your ground." Some have already called off concerts, she wrote. Her AURN report was picked up by congressional newspaper The Hill and the Huffington Post on July 22, read and shared by thousands. The next day, even more newspapers picked it up but tried to add a little more caution (including the Tampa Bay Times). Ryan’s list contained two groups that were not on the Instagram roundup: Eddie Levert, lead singer of the R&B group The O’Jays, and gospel duo Mary Mary "We love our fans but we MUST do something!!" Mary Mary wrote on Facebook. "We understand a No from us isn’t as big as a No from Stevie Wonder but if all our voices join together we can REALLY change things!" These are the only artists from Ryan’s list of 23 artists who have announced they are joining Wonder’s effort. Ryan has since updated her post with a disclaimer: I obtained from multiple sources early Monday a list of artists and entertainers who my sources told me had committed to a boycott of Florida following the George Zimmerman acquittal. Since publishing that list I have heard from several representatives of the artists named who say, on behalf of their clients, they are uncomfortable being identified on that list and are seeking additional information. The Huffington Post, hearing from artists' reps that the list was not true (but not willing to go on the record), later wrote a story discrediting its original post. The shows still go on We did our own reporting. Most of the artists do not have upcoming tour dates in Florida. Rihanna, for example, was just in Tampa in April. Madonna is not on tour. "This leg of Rod Stewart's tour hasn't ever included Florida dates so that isn't accurate," said Hannah Kampf, a spokeswoman for Stewart. Madonna did not join the boycott, spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg told us. Neither did Alicia Keys, whose spokeswoman said in a statement, "We question the validity of this list since Alicia's name along with many others has appeared erroneously." A spokeswoman for the Rolling Stones told Mother Jones no one in the band had "heard anything about this." Timberlake and Jay Z do have their shared "Legends of the Summer" concert on Aug. 16 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami. Timberlake has another concert planned for December in Orlando. If the show is off, no one told the ticket vendors, updated either artist’s website or informed the venues. Sun Life Stadium tweeted us that the concert "is on as scheduled." Funk maestro George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, also named among artists boycotting Florida, is scheduled to play in Tallahassee on July 28. We found nothing to contradict that. And funk stars Maze and Frankie Beverly are still slated to perform at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg on Sept. 15, a spokeswoman confirmed to tbt*, a daily tabloid published by the Tampa Bay Times. Our ruling The Internet is rife with claims of Stevie Wonder’s beefed-up Florida boycott. It’s short on proof. Most of the stars identified in social media lists may have spoken out against the verdict or in support of Trayvon, but we haven’t seen them go the extra mile and call off shows until the "stand your ground" law is abolished. With the exception of two smaller acts that aren’t included in some iterations of the meme, we could not find evidence to back up the notion that scores of acts are joining up with Wonder's boycott. We rate this statement False. We updated this check after publishing with comments from representatives for Madonna and Alicia Keys. | null | Instagram posts | null | null | null | 2013-07-23T17:44:58 | 2013-07-21 | ['Justin_Timberlake', 'Stevie_Wonder', 'Rihanna', 'Jay-Z'] |
goop-02740 | Meghan Markle Asked About Marrying Prince Harry At ‘Suits’ Event, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/meghan-markle-marrying-prince-harry-suits-event-fake-news/ | null | null | null | Michael Lewittes | null | Meghan Markle NOT Asked About Marrying Prince Harry At ‘Suits’ Event, Despite Fake News Stories | 12:55 pm, June 14, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05463 | If you're earning under $100,000 a year and you commute to New York every day you pay more to the Port Authority in tolls than you pay to the state of New Jersey in income tax. | true | /new-jersey/statements/2012/apr/23/john-wisniewski/john-wisniewski-claims-some-new-jersey-commuters-p/ | Hudson River tolls are not a drop in the bucket. Crossing the waterway sets motorists paying cash back $12. For some New Jerseyans, commuting to work in New York costs more than they pay in New Jersey income taxes, according to Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a Democrat from Middlesex County. "There's one statistic that says if you're earning under $100,000 a year and you commute to New York every day you pay more to the Port Authority in tolls than you pay to the state of New Jersey in income tax," Wisniewski, the chairman of the state Democratic Party, said in a YouTube video posted on April 13. "That's outrageous and that's got to be changed." PolitiFact New Jersey found Wisniewski’s statement is accurate because people who earn all of their income from wages in New York won’t pay New Jersey income taxes. Wisniewski said his statement refers to a married couple with children. When the assemblyman’s office initially calculated the statistic it was based on a couple who earned $80,000 a year and had two children and one partner commuted to work in New York, using E-ZPass and taking two weeks of vacation, according to Tim O’Donovan, Wisniewski’s communication director. But a broad group of commuters pay more tolls than New Jersey income taxes. New Jersey residents who work in New York file tax returns with both states. New Jersey provides a credit that varies depending on income to residents for taxes paid to New York. Any resident who only has income from wages in New York "will always get a full credit," said Neil Becourtney, a certified public accountant and tax partner at J.H. Cohn LLP’s Roseland office. "They will end up with no New Jersey income tax." Ron West, professor of taxation and law at Fairleigh Dickinson University, noted that if income is earned in New Jersey and New York, there "could be a situation where the credit will not fully offset the New Jersey tax and there would be something owed." Still, even if residents owe nothing to New Jersey, West said, "they’re paying tax, but New Jersey is not getting their hands on it." Instead, New York is. For example, a married couple who earns $100,000 combined would owe New York more than $5,000 in income taxes, factoring in personal exemptions but no other deductions. Had that income been earned in New Jersey, the couple would owe roughly $2,600. The credit offsets the couple’s New Jersey taxes. So, they owe nothing to their home state, but they still pay New York taxes. O’Donovan said Wisniewski’s office also looked at what residents would owe New Jersey without the credit. By that measure, a married couple with a taxable income of less than $94,950 would pay more in tolls than taxes if one partner commuted every weekday using E-ZPass. The same applies for an individual with a taxable income of less than $71,750. Driving to New York five days a week, 52 weeks a year, would cost an E-ZPass user $2,470 in tolls annually. Cash users would pay $3,120. Annual toll costs drop about $100 with two weeks’ vacation taken. Our ruling "If you're earning under $100,000 a year and you commute to New York every day you pay more to the Port Authority in tolls than you pay to the state of New Jersey in income tax," Wisniewski said. If New Jersey residents earn all their income from wages in New York, they would owe New Jersey nothing because a credit offsets their tax liability. They’d still pay income taxes to New York, but Wisniewski specifically said taxes paid to New Jersey. We rate this claim True. To comment on this story, go to NJ.com. | null | John Wisniewski | null | null | null | 2012-04-23T07:30:00 | 2012-04-13 | ['New_Jersey', 'New_York_City'] |
pomt-13535 | Her campaign and her supporters in her campaign were the ones that borne out the birther movement. | half-true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/29/reince-priebus/reince-priebus-says-clinton-campaign-and-supporter/ | People may have heard from Donald Trump about the long-running myth that President Barack Obama was born outside of the United States, but Republicans say the rumor actually started from those on the left. According to GOP chairman Reince Priebus, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and supporters were responsible for starting the myth. "Her campaign and her supporters in her campaign were the ones that borne out the birther movement," Priebus told NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard a claim about the birther movement. In 2015, Donald Trump tweeted that Hillary Clinton started the movement in 2008, adding "She was all in!" We rated this statement False, because there was no link to the movement and Clinton. Priebus falls halfway into the same hole, but added that her supporters also started the myth. We wanted to revisit the claim in a broader context. It started with an email In a previous fact-check, we found no evidence that Clinton or her official campaign had any direct link to starting the birther movement. Factcheck.org confirmed this, too. They reported that no journalist who explored this theory found a connection to anyone in the Clinton camp. Clinton even denied the accusation when CNN’s Don Lemon asked if she started the rumor Obama was not born in America. "That is – no. That is so ludicrous, Don. You know, honestly, I just believe that, first of all, it’s totally untrue, and secondly, you know, the president and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that," Clinton said. So the first part of Priebus’ statement is inaccurate. However, Priebus has a point about Clinton supporters starting the movement. During a somewhat close primary race between Obama and Clinton, it was reported that Clinton supporters sent out anonymous emails questioning if Obama was actually born in Hawaii. This was originally reported by Politico and the Telegraph. In addition, John Avalon, editor-in-chief of the the Daily Beast, wrote in his book, Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, that Clinton volunteer Linda Starr played a key role in spreading the tale. Starr, who served as a delegate in the Texas state convention, volunteered for the Clinton campaign during the Texas primary, according to Avalon. Starr teamed up with a Pennsylvania lawyer Philip Berg, and Berg went to federal court, suing to block Obama’s nomination. That suit was thrown out multiple times, according to our article from 2015. On June 7, 2008, Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign, and urged her supporters to rally behind Obama. Our ruling Priebus said Clinton’s campaign and her supporters started the birther movement. Half of this claim is true. It has been reported by several news outlets that Clinton supporters sent emails accusing Obama of being born outside the United States. However, there is no evidence that Clinton or her official campaign had anything to do with it. On balance, we rate Priebus’ claim Half True. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/3b1f7651-2206-4984-bf4f-534f5448ffd6 | null | Reince Priebus | null | null | null | 2016-08-29T16:17:22 | 2016-08-29 | ['None'] |
goop-00839 | Was Scott Disick Told “Stay Away” From Kids By Kourtney Kardashian? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/scott-disick-kourtney-kardashian-kids-stay-away-false/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Was Scott Disick Told “Stay Away” From Kids By Kourtney Kardashian? | 3:56 pm, June 11, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
goop-01247 | Kylie Jenner Says Kris Managing Kanye West, Travis Scott, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kris-jenner-kanye-west-travis-scott-manager-kylie-not-true/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Kylie Jenner Says Kris NOT Managing Kanye West, Travis Scott, Despite Report | 2:32 pm, April 4, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02496 | Restaurant workers at Smithfield's Chicken & Barbeque Jones Sausage in Raleigh sang "fuck the police" at visiting officers. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/restaurant-employees-police-song/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Did Raleigh Restaurant Employees Sing an Offensive Song at a Group of Police Officers? | 4 May 2017 | null | ['None'] |
hoer-00077 | Warning - 'Talking Angela' Threat to Children | bogus warning | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/talking-angela-warning.shtml | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Bogus Warning - 'Talking Angela' Threat to Children | February 25, 2013 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-00569 | U.S. Embassy Celebrates America’s Independence on June 4th in Order to Accommodate Muslims. | mostly true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/10/blog-posting/social-media-posts-say-us-embassy-moved-july-4-cel/ | There’s a new outrage at the Obama administration in the social media universe, this time for actions that seem to place Muslim sensibilities above good old-fashioned American patriotism. "U.S. Embassy Celebrates America’s Independence on June 4th in Order to Accommodate Muslims," reads one typical headline on the website Young Conservatives. Other conservative sites published similar posts, including the Federalist Papers Project (which blamed a "misplaced sense of political correctness"), Gateway Pundit (which griped, "It’s an Obama world") and the American Thinker (which called the decision "mind-boggling"). Several readers spotted such claims in their social media feeds and asked us to check them out. The urban-legends site Snopes.com also checked into the claim. Most of the social media posts cite a news story published on June 5, 2015, in the Jakarta Post, an English-language newspaper in Indonesia’s capital city. "The United States Embassy enjoyed its annual 4th of July celebration on Thursday, June 4, one month early, in order to respect the upcoming Ramadhan month, which will begin on June 17 and last for one month," the story said. "U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Robert O. Blake and U.S. Ambassador to (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Nina Hachigian presided over the festivities, which involved brass band renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Indonesian national anthem, Indonesia Raya." The same day, the embassy put out a prepared text of the ambassador’s remarks from the event. "Friends, my fellow Americans, welcome to America's Independence Day celebration!" he said. "We are celebrating a month early to respect the holy month of Ramadan, but today we remember the revolutionary Congress meeting on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia that issued America’s ‘Declaration of Independence’ that changed the course of modern history." So, there’s a solid basis for the social-media claims that (1) the embassy moved the date of its celebration of July 4, and (2) that it did it in order to accommodate Ramadan. Still, it’s worth noting some additional context that overheated social media posts overlooked or ignored. Indonesia has more Muslim residents than any other country in the world -- an estimated 204 million in 2010, or 88 percent of the country’s total population. So the marking of Ramadan -- the month-long period of daylight fasting and self-reflection -- has a significant impact on daily life in Indonesia. Because Ramadan is tied to the lunar calendar, it cycles around the calendar through all the seasons. This year, it happened to overlap with July 4, but in another year, it could overlap with Christmas or Thanksgiving. Diplomatic experts told PolitiFact that the key reason such parties are held in the first place is not for the benefit of embassy staff or Americans, but rather to share America’s values with opinion leaders in the host country. "An embassy’s Fourth of July celebration is an occasion to play host to a wide range of important figures in the local society, to cultivate their friendship and understanding, and to show off some of the attractive features of American culture -- openness, hospitality, generosity, and the enjoyment of simple pleasures," said Harry W. Kopp, a former foreign service officer who co-authored the book Career Diplomacy. If people in Jakarta are preoccupied with a holy month -- and one where they cannot eat during daylight hours -- then it doesn’t make sense to schedule an outreach event for that period, he said. During the daily State Department briefing on June 9, department spokesman Jeff Rathke confirmed that was the thinking. The purpose of the event "is to represent the United States to the host nation and to the host government," Rathke said. "So of course, to do that most effectively, we want to hold these events when the guests are best able to attend and when we can most effectively achieve the purpose of the event. Such reschedulings are "not unusual" and are done "for various reasons," said Nicholas Kralev, a former diplomatic correspondent and author. These include reschedulings for reasons having nothing to do with Ramadan. "In 2012, the U.S. Embassy in Oman celebrated our 236th year of independence in February that year," according to the diplomatic blog Diplopundit. "We were once told that heat is the reason for these early 4th of July celebrations at various overseas posts. At one (European) post, we heard that it was the heat and the fact that most government officials leave the capital city in July. In 2013 and again in 2014, the US Embassy in Nepal celebrated July 4th three months earlier, in March ‘in the hopes of escaping monsoon weather.’ " Our ruling Various social media posts recently offered headlines like this one: "U.S. Embassy Celebrates America’s Independence on June 4th in Order to Accommodate Muslims" The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta did reschedule its July 4 celebration for June 4, and it explained the move as a way "to respect" the holy month of Ramadan. The switch had to do with increasing the odds of a successful event by scheduling it when local people would not be distracted by a religious observance that requires daytime fasting. Also, it’s not unprecedented for embassies to re-schedule July 4th celebrations for a variety of reasons, including the weather. The blog posts are accurate but require additional information, so we rate the statement Mostly True. | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2015-06-10T15:59:07 | 2015-06-06 | ['United_States'] |
pomt-12695 | Babysitter on crystal meth eats 3-month-old baby. | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/mar/13/blog-posting/story-missouri-girl-accused-trying-eat-toddler-she/ | An odious fake news story claiming that a 16-year-old Missouri girl smoked crystal meth and attempted to eat the toddler she was babysitting is yet another example of a half-baked Internet post that has tricked readers into thinking it’s real. This one is disturbing enough that we want to start by reiterating that it is fake, just so there is no confusion. The headline on a Feb. 28, 2017, post on NotAllowedTo.com claimed "Babysitter on crystal meth eats 3-month-old baby." The article was flagged by Facebook users as being potentially contrived as part of Facebook’s efforts to fight fake stories in news feeds. This post and others similar to it have been shared on Facebook thousands of times. The story said a 16-year-old named Anna Ritchie smoked the drug and drank alcohol while watching a child, then told police she ate some chicken wings and passed out. The parents had supposedly found the baby (alive) in the microwave, covered in barbecue sauce with bite marks on the boy’s arms and legs. So even in the context of the post, he didn’t really get eaten. If it’s any comfort, not only is the story fake, it also said the boy was expected to recover. The photo included on most of the posts is not a ravenous, drug-smoking teenager from Missouri. It’s actually of a 28-year-old Indiana woman arrested in January 2016 on domestic battery charges. The true source of this story is a Jan. 20, 2016, article on WorldNewsDailyReport.com, a website known for posting fake articles. (That version said the babysitter’s name was Anna Krutchiev.) The site says in its disclaimer that it is responsible for "the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content." There is no indication on the post we checked, or on most of the others reblogging the same fake story, that it's fabricated. Comments on these stories make it clear some horrified readers were tricked. But this story about a babysitter getting high and attempting to eat a child never happened. We rate it Pants On Fire! See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Bloggers | null | null | null | 2017-03-13T14:01:22 | 2017-02-28 | ['None'] |
pomt-14247 | The polling shows over and over again that, unlike Donald Trump, that with me as the nominee, we beat Hillary Clinton. | mostly false | /california/statements/2016/apr/12/ted-cruz/ted-cruz-repeats-mostly-false-claim-about-polls-sh/ | Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz brought his fiery calls for limited government and lower taxes to California on Monday, during stump speeches in Irvine and San Diego. The Texas senator also brought a claim, one PolitiFact recently rated Mostly False, about what the polls show in a general election matchup between him and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. "The polling shows over and over again that, unlike Donald Trump, that with me as the (GOP presidential) nominee, we beat Hillary Clinton," Cruz told supporters at an Irvine rally. Sen. Cruz makes his claim about the polls at the 24 minute mark in the above YouTube video. Here’s the Mostly False claim PolitiFact examined, based on comments Cruz made on CNN on April 7. "My focus is on beating Hillary Clinton, and poll after poll after poll shows Donald losing badly to Hillary. And poll after poll after poll shows me beating Hillary." The claims are substantially the same. When rating the statement Cruz made in Irvine, PolitiFact California will apply the same research used by national fact-checking website PolitiFact when it examined Cruz’ claim on CNN. Why PolitiFact rated this claim Mostly False PolitiFact found Cruz was right about polls showing GOP frontrunner Donald Trump losing to Clinton in a November matchup. It rated that statement True earlier this week. But PolitiFact found Cruz wasn’t accurate when portraying his own standing against Clinton in the surveys. PolitiFact examined recent national polls archived on RealClearPolitics.com and found that the Texas senator is off. It found: "Of the nine surveys released in the last month, Cruz beats Clinton in only one — a Fox News poll where Cruz scores 3 percentage points higher than Clinton. The two were tied in the latest McClatchy/Marist poll and in a CNN/ORC poll. The margins of error were +/- 3 percentage points. In the other six polls, Clinton beat Cruz. In four of those surveys, Clinton's advantage exceeded the margin of error. Ted Cruz vs. Hillary Clinton Create your own infographics Cruz was looking stronger against Clinton in February, where he tied or beat Clinton in five of six surveys. But in only one of those polls was Cruz's edge greater than the margin of error. If you use the most recent results from the various polling organizations since Feb. 4, Cruz wins in two, ties in two and loses in seven." PolitiFact contacted Cruz' spokeswoman last week to ask about the results but didn't hear back. It concluded: "So when Cruz says he beats Clinton in poll after poll after poll, he's short a poll or two." Our ruling PolitiFact rated Cruz’ claim on CNN as Mostly False. That rating means it has an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. Likewise, PolitiFact California rates Cruz’ claim at the Irvine rally as Mostly False. Click here for more on the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/acdaa0a1-592b-435d-98ee-eeb5af77a286 | null | Ted Cruz | null | null | null | 2016-04-12T15:03:46 | 2016-04-11 | ['Donald_Trump', 'Hillary_Rodham_Clinton'] |
vees-00483 | And when he won, Duterte promised he would undergo a “metamorphosis” after taking oath. | none | http://verafiles.org/articles/vera-files-fact-check-has-duterte-kept-his-vow-stop-cursing | null | null | null | null | Duterte,cussing | VERA FILES FACT CHECK: Has Duterte kept his vow to stop cursing? | November 05, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-12361 | Says "Scott Baio .. dies in small plane crash." | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2017/jun/07/daily-usa-update/actor-scott-baio-healthy-after-fake-news-report-hi/ | Hold your tears for Scott Baio, the young actor of Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi fame. While you might have read that he died in a plane crash, he didn’t. The fake news site Daily USA Update described his death in an article datelined June 1. The next day, Baio posted this photo on Twitter, flexing his bicep in support of American troops as part of a USO campaign called Flex4Forces. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com Baio is a huge fan of President Donald Trump who also made it into the false report. "Scott Baio, 56, was killed when the single-engine Cessna he was in crashed into the side of a hill in Louisiana," the article said. "Baio was headed to Mar-A-Lago to barbecue shrimp and play gold with President Trump." The attentive reader will notice the likely typo of "gold" in place of "golf." The error, along with the rest of the article, showed up in a May 29 post on a similarly fake news website. The rumor-monitoring website Snopes declared that false the same day.This is not the first time Baio has been prematurely declared dead. A 1997 hoax said he had died in a car accident. We rate the Daily USA Update headline that Scott Baio is dead Pants on Fire! See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Daily USA Update | null | null | null | 2017-06-07T11:30:04 | 2017-06-01 | ['None'] |
thal-00040 | FactFind: How does Ireland's jobseeker's benefit compare to the rest of the EU? | none | http://www.thejournal.ie/unemployment-benefits-across-europe-3625519-Oct2017/ | null | null | null | null | null | FactFind: How does Ireland's jobseeker's benefit compare to the rest of the EU? | Oct 4th 2017, 10:00 PM | null | ['None'] |
goop-02901 | Zayn Malik “Worried” Harry Styles Will “Steal Thunder” With Solo Music, | 1 | https://www.gossipcop.com/zayn-malik-worried-harry-styles-solo-music-feud-jealous/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Zayn Malik NOT “Worried” Harry Styles Will “Steal Thunder” With Solo Music, Despite Claim | 3:44 pm, March 28, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-05990 | Says 282 Texas school districts have requested emergency waivers to increase elementary school class sizes because of "unprecedented fiscal challenges." | half-true | /texas/statements/2012/jan/21/silvestre-reyes/silvestre-reyes-says-says-282-texas-school-distric/ | In a Jan. 9, 2012, press release, U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, urged Republican Gov. Rick Perry to convene a special legislative session so lawmakers can provide more money to "under-served schools." Citing the Legislature's 2011 decision to give school districts $4 billion less through August 2013 than they would have gotten under previous funding formulas, Reyes said: "Our school districts are now experiencing unprecedented fiscal challenges and being forced to take drastic measures, like increasing class sizes and cutting instructional supports. In fact, the Texas Education Agency is reporting that 282 school districts have requested emergency waivers to increase class sizes." That would be nearly a third of the state's 1,000-plus districts. Is the congressman right? His statistic checks out, we found, but it's unlikely that all the requests were driven by financial difficulties. Texas has capped the size of classes in kindergarten through fourth grade since 1984, when the Legislature passed a measure setting the limit at 22 students per teacher. The thinking at the time was that smaller classes would result in greater student achievement. But the caps had an out. Currently, a school district may receive a waiver if the state education commissioner "finds the limit works an undue hardship on the district." In an interview, Texas Education Agency spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe told us that state education officials originally set two scenarios under which waivers would be granted: if a district were unable to hire enough teachers or lacked the classroom space to meet the 22:1 ratio. Later, she said, the agency added an additional factor — if a district had experienced unanticipated enrollment growth. From fall 1993 through spring 2010, the number of districts granted class-size waivers generally fluctuated between 90 and 150 each semester, according to information in two reports from the education agency. Ratcliffe told us that over the years, the agency approved "virtually every waiver (request) that was submitted." To support Reyes' claim that the number of Texas school districts seeking waivers rocketed to 282 this school year, his office sent us a Jan. 3, 2012, El Paso Times article containing figures attributed to the state. As of Dec. 21, 2011, the article says, 282 districts had requested waivers for 1,643 campuses and 8,186 classrooms. When requesting a waiver, a district must designate how many classes at each campus will exceed the cap. Ratcliffe, confirming the 282 figure, told us that of those requests, 266 were granted outright while 16 districts were given partial approval, meaning some campuses could exceed the limit while others could not. The education agency generally rejected waivers for campuses rated "academically unacceptable" under the state's education accountability rating system, Ratcliffe said. As of Jan. 10, 2012, a total of 286 districts had sought class-size waivers. Of those, 270 — including the Austin, Del Valle, Eanes, Hays, Lake Travis, Leander, Manor, Pflugerville and Round Rock districts — had been granted waivers outright. That's an all-time high, Ratcliffe said. For comparison, she said, there were 168 waivers granted to districts in the 2010-11 school year. So, as of early 2012, district class-size waivers had increased 61 percent since the previous school year. What’s going on? Even before the 2011 legislative session began in January, state funding for education was expected to be stressed because of lawmakers' vow to balance the 2012-13 state budget without raising taxes. In addition to the $4 billion drop in formula-based funding to districts, lawmakers also did not renew about $1.3 billion in grant funding for education programs. Some districts had local funding problems as well, Ratcliffe said, as declining property values reduced property tax revenue. To help districts deal with the budget-tightening, lawmakers considered softening the 22-to-1 class-size cap. They did not agree on any change, but in the fall, Education Commissioner Robert Scott made it easier for districts to exceed the limit by adding "financial hardship" as a fourth reason districts could qualify for a waiver. Ratcliffe told us that this school year is unusual because some districts had enough classroom space to adhere to the class-size rule and had access to qualified teacher candidates, but still lacked the funds to hire them. Ratcliffe speculated that districts' financial difficulties are what led to the big uptick in waiver requests this school year. Another likely factor, she said, is that some districts built their budgets assuming that lawmakers would loosen the class-size cap — and when that didn't happen, they were too far along in budgeting for the year to adjust. We asked the education agency whether all the districts that had requested waivers as of early 2012 had cited "financial hardship" in their applications. Ratcliffe said the agency had not crunched the data that way. On Jan. 19, 2012, we looked at the data ourselves after generating a report on this school year’s waivers from the education agency’s website. The report had 2,911 entries, one for each grade level of each school that would be affected by a waiver. For example, if a district received a waiver for kindergarten and fourth grade at one elementary school, there would be two entries in the report for that campus. Our overview: ** At least 163 school districts that had received waivers cited "financial hardship" as the reason for seeking the exception for at least one campus. That's 60 percent of the total number of districts that had received waivers as of early January. ** Some districts that requested waivers hadn't cited "financial hardship" as a reason, including Houston, the state's largest school district, which had received waivers for 441 grade levels over 146 campuses, and Austin, which had received waivers for 18 grade levels in 16 elementary schools. ** Some districts exclusively cited the "financial hardship" reason in their requests, including Dallas, which had received exceptions for 45 grade levels on 34 campuses, and Bexar County's Northside, which had received waivers for 150 grade levels on 63 campuses. Our ruling Reyes accurately recaps how many districts had requested class-size waivers from the state education agency as of late December 2011 — a number that subsequently grew. Yet, his suggestion that financial difficulties born from the 2011 Legislature’s actions are responsible for all of the waiver requests is an overstatement, considering that historically, dozens of districts have sought and received waivers each year. Then again, 60 percent of districts that had received a waiver as of early January cited the new "financial hardship" reason when seeking permission to exceed the class-size law. We rate Reyes' statement Half True. | null | Silvestre Reyes | null | null | null | 2012-01-21T06:00:00 | 2012-01-09 | ['Texas'] |
snes-03154 | Stacks of file folders presented as evidence that President-elect Donald Trump was turning his business holdings over to his children were empty and/or contained blank sheets of paper. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-busted-using-empty-folders/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | Trump Used Blank Sheets of Paper as Conflict-of-Interest Documents? | 12 January 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pose-01018 | I’ve said that I want to consolidate a whole bunch of government agencies. We should have one secretary of business, instead of nine different departments that are dealing with things like getting loans to SBA [the Small Business Administration] or helping companies with exports. There should be a one-stop shop. Now, the reason we haven’t done that is not because of some big ideological difference. It has to do with Congress talking a good game about wanting to streamline government, but being very protective about not giving up their jurisdiction over various pieces of government. | promise broken | https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/1098/create-secretary-business-and-consolidate-nine-gov/ | null | obameter | Barack Obama | null | null | Create a secretary of business and consolidate nine goverment agencies on business into one | 2013-01-20T06:00:00 | null | ['United_States_Congress', 'Small_Business_Administration'] |
goop-00032 | Katie Holmes, Nicole Kidman Planning To Work Together? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/nicole-kidman-katie-holmes-working-together-tom-cruise/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Katie Holmes, Nicole Kidman Planning To Work Together? | 12:32 pm, November 6, 2018 | null | ['Katie_Holmes', 'Nicole_Kidman'] |
pomt-12406 | Voter turnout in 2016 was reduced by approx. 200,000 votes because of WI’s photo ID laws. | mostly false | /wisconsin/statements/2017/may/24/tammy-baldwin/photo-id-law-caused-200000-drop-wisconsin-voter-tu/ | As they have for years, claims of voter suppression continue to be made by Democrats, including U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. When President Donald Trump signed an order to create a commission to study voter fraud, Moore attacked its vice chairman as having "led numerous voter suppression initiatives against minorities." Five days later, on May 17, 2017, Baldwin made this declaration on Twitter: Voter turnout in 2016 was reduced by approx. 200,000 votes because of WI’s photo ID laws. We’ve rated Mostly True a claim by TV show host John Oliver that in Sauk City, Wis., the office that provides identification for voting was open only four days in 2016. But on a claim closer to Baldwin’s, we rated False tweets that said "300,000 voters were turned away" by Wisconsin’s voter ID law in the 2016 presidential election. A federal judge had determined that some 300,000 registered voters lacked the necessary ID to vote, but there was no evidence that anywhere near that number of people were turned away from the polls. What about Baldwin’s claim? What voter ID is about Thirty-four states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls, according to the nonprofit National Conference of State Legislatures. Wisconsin is among seven states that have a strict requirement -- voters without acceptable identification must vote on a provisional ballot and also take additional steps after election day for their vote to be counted. As the group puts it: Proponents see increasing requirements for identification as a way to prevent in-person voter impersonation and increase public confidence in the election process. Opponents say there is little fraud of this kind, and the burden on voters unduly restricts the right to vote and imposes unnecessary costs and administrative burdens on elections administrators. A few days before Baldwin made her statement, the Associated Press reported on examples of Wisconsin residents who said they couldn’t get the ID they needed to vote in the 2016 presidential election -- the first presidential contest in which the state’s ID law was in place. But the story said it is unknown how many people did not vote because they didn’t have proper identification. Baldwin’s evidence To back Baldwin’s claim, her campaign cited a report issued two weeks earlier. It’s worth noting who was behind it. The report was commissioned by Priorities USA Action, a political action committee that supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and describes itself as a "voter-centric progressive advocacy organization" that is "committed to standing up to the Trump administration and its allies." The group says its "voter suppression analysis" is part of an effort to "glean lessons that can be applied to strengthen Democrats in elections in 2018, 2020 and beyond." The report was conducted by CIVIS USA, a Chicago firm founded by the chief analytics officer of the 2012 Obama campaign team. The report compares the 2012 and 2016 elections. It says that on average, turnout increased 1.3 percent in states in which there was no change to voter ID laws, but decreased 3.3 percent in Wisconsin. The report concludes that had there been no voter ID in Wisconsin, turnout would have risen by 1.3 percent -- or 200,000 voters -- over the 2012 total. (Although it doesn’t affect the rating of Baldwin’s claim, the report also argues, based on other data, that the 200,000 people it refers to "would have been more Democratic," and notes that Clinton lost to Trump in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes.) Ignoring other factors Roughly 3 million votes were cast in each of the last three presidential elections in Wisconsin. As we’ve noted, the 2016 turnout was lower than 2012, when Obama won reelection and there was no voter ID requirement. On the other hand, the 2016 turnout was higher than when Obama was first elected in 2008 and, again, there was no voter ID law. More importantly, according to experts, the methodology of the report Baldwin cites is lacking. Put simply: The voter ID requirement undoubtedly prevented or discouraged some people from voting. But the report attributes all of the decrease in turnout to the ID law, when there are many other reasons that could also explain it, including a lack of enthusiasm for Clinton or Trump, or perhaps a belief that Trump couldn’t win Wisconsin. "The story is getting picked up by Democrats and left-leaning smart people across social media because it confirms what they already think," University of California, Irvine law and political science professor Rick Hasen wrote on his election law blog. "But there is reason for considerable caution about this study, which is at odds with what other studies of the effect of Wisconsin’s voter ID has found. There are questions about the study’s methodology being raised by people who know their stuff." Yale University political science professor Eitan Hersh tweeted: "No offense, but this is something that is going to be shared hundreds of times and does not meet acceptable evidence standards." Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told us there’s simply no way to put a number on how many people didn’t vote because of the voter ID law. Bucknell University political science professor Lindsay Nielson has done research finding that voter ID laws lower minority turnout and benefit the Republican Party. But as for the voter turnout decline in Wisconsin, "there could be a multitude of other reasons" why voters stayed home, she told us. "Voter ID laws could very well have been suppressing voter turnout in Wisconsin," but "we just can’t say it’s 200,000 people. We need a lot more research before we can draw that conclusion." Baldwin campaign spokesman Scott Spector responded by saying "there is no reason to question the (CIVIS) study or believe other factors were involved," because of one of the findings in a September 2014 by the nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office. But that finding didn't look at the 2016 election and involved two different states. The GAO found turnout between the 2008 and 2012 elections declined more in Kansas and Tennessee than in states that did not change voter ID requirements -- by an estimated 1.9 to 2.2 percentage points more in Kansas and 2.2 to 3.2 percentage points more in Tennessee — and the results "were attributable to changes in those two states’ voter ID requirements." Our rating Baldwin says: "Voter turnout in 2016 was reduced by approx. 200,000 votes because of WI’s photo ID laws." A report she cites from a Democratic candidate-supporting group says a decline in voter turnout between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections in Wisconsin was entirely due to the state’s new photo identification requirement for voting. But experts say that while photo ID requirements reduces turnout to some extent, they question the methodology of the report and say there is no way to put a number on how many people in Wisconsin didn’t vote because of the ID requirement. We rate Baldwin’s statement Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Tammy Baldwin | null | null | null | 2017-05-24T05:00:00 | 2017-05-17 | ['None'] |
pomt-10116 | If you're a small business and don't "adopt the health care plan that Senator Obama mandates, he's going to fine you." | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/15/john-mccain/small-businesses-are-exempt/ | John McCain talked a lot about "Joe the Plumber" during the third presidential debate, saying Joe is an example of a small business owner who would not do well under Barack Obama's policies. "Now, my old buddy, Joe, Joe the plumber, is out there," McCain said. "Now, Joe, Senator Obama's plan, if you're a small business ... if you don't adopt the health care plan that Senator Obama mandates, he's going to fine you." McCain used this charge during the second debate as well. We found it False then, and it's still problematic now. Here's the outline of Obama's plan: It 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's plan says that employers who don't offer their employees insurance will be required to contribute to the national pool, what McCain calls a "fine." But Obama's plan specifically exempts small businesses from contributing to the pool. The plan does not define what's a small business and what's not. We can't say for sure whether plumber Joe would be considered a small business under Obama's plan or not. But generally, Obama does not fine "small businesses." They are specifically exempt. We rate McCain's claim False. | null | John McCain | null | null | null | 2008-10-15T00:00:00 | 2008-10-15 | ['Barack_Obama'] |
pomt-12711 | Under the Affordable Care Act, "some people were gaming the system" by paying "for nine months of insurance, get 12 -- the other three for free." | mostly false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2017/mar/08/greg-walden/are-americans-gaming-system-get-cheaper-obamacare-/ | Some Republicans who want to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have recently argued that the current law encourages beneficiaries to game the system to get 12 months of coverage for the price of nine. The idea is that the law bars insurers from cutting off beneficiaries from their coverage during the first three months after they have stopped paying their premiums. This provision was intended to protect beneficiaries from being caught without coverage due to sudden financial crises or paperwork errors. But this provision does, in theory, allow people to stop paying their premiums after nine months, not paying for three, but then signing up for a new plan again. The first time we noticed this talking point was when former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., mentioned it during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union in late February. "The reality is today that thousands, maybe approaching millions of Americans, are paying nine months for insurance," Santorum said. "Why? Because you pay for your insurance for nine months, there’s a provision in Obamacare that says you can’t be thrown off your plan for three months." Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., echoed this point on March 7, as House Republican leaders were touting their new bill to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature health care law. "One of the issues we found is that some people were gaming the system with guaranteed issue," Walden, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a news conference. ("Guaranteed issue" bars health insurers from denying coverage for such factors as pre-existing conditions.) "It's not that they had a pre-existing condition necessarily," Walden continued. "It's they'd pay for nine months of insurance, get 12, the other three for free, automatically come back in the market. That was part of what's causing this spiral downward." We wondered: Are significant numbers of Americans intentionally gaming the system, even though it would almost certainly mean additional paperwork and bureaucratic hassles, in order to save three months’ worth of premiums a year? What we found is that while such a loophole exists, there is no direct evidence of people intentionally gaming the system in this way -- and even the maximum universe of people who could theoretically be doing this represents a small proportion of the law's beneficiaries. Walden’s office directed us to a May 2016 study by McKinsey & Company's Center for U.S. Health System Reform. The study is based on roughly 16,000 interviews conducted in eight rounds between 2013 and 2016. Those interviewed are uninsured and individually insured consumers but does not include those eligible for Medicaid and Medicare. One of the study’s findings, headlined at the front of the report, was this one: "Nearly a quarter of consumers stopped payment on their premiums in 2015, yet most repurchased an exchange plan in 2016 and many repurchased the same plan." Superficially, this seems to bolster Walden’s point -- but looking only at the headline obscures some important nuances. For instance, while Walden painted this as an example of nine months in, three months out, the reality is that the study found a more complicated picture. Among those who stopped paying, 30 percent stopped in the first quarter of the year, 13 stopped in the second quarter and 22 percent stopped in the third quarter. Only 29 percent stopped paying in the fourth quarter -- the closest scenario to what Walden described. (Another 17 percent didn’t know what quarter they stopped paying.) And it’s important to remember that these percentages don’t refer to all people who have a plan through the Affordable Care Act -- they refer only to the 21 percent of those surveyed who said they stopped paying their premiums. And 29 percent of 21 percent works out to 6 percent of all survey respondents. Six percent is a pretty small share of people who could be gaming the system -- but it’s also important to note that we don’t know whether these people actually are gaming the system on purpose. The 6 percent figure is a maximum universe of possible system-gamers. In reality, the percentage is probably well below that, judging by other data from the same survey. The survey found that 36 percent of those who stopped paying did so because they gained other coverage. Those people certainly can’t be accused of gaming the system. If you exclude them, the 6 percent figure drops to 3.8 percent. Another 26 percent said they could no longer afford insurance. For some people, affordability isn’t inconsistent with gaming the system; it may be the reason they decided to do so. Still, it seems likely that some fraction of these people were genuinely cash-strapped and dropped out without expecting to sign up again. So the maximum universe of possible system-gamers is probably in the neighborhood of 2 percent to 3 percent. And it’s important to remember that this is the maximum possible universe of people gaming the system based on this data. The actual number of people gaming the system -- a behavior that can only be triangulated through the data -- could be well below this 2 to 3 percent baseline. Bottom line: Gaming the system probably happens, but it’s pretty rare. "The number of people gaming the system appears to be small, based on the McKinsey study," said Stan Dorn, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute Health Policy Center. "That fits my general sense -- that most consumers are really confused about marketplace coverage and not really in a position to game the system. Some can do so, but the proportion is small." Donald H. Taylor, a health policy specialist in Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, agreed. Given the "empirical holes" in the data, Taylor said, "the congressman overstated the case." Gail Wilensky, who headed Medicare and Medicaid under President George H.W. Bush, said that the lack of survey data on the specific question of gaming the system makes it hard to speak to motivations. Walden’s statement "is by its nature speculative because the data we have remains so poor," she said. The experts did agree that even if a small number of people are taking advantage of the loophole, it’s reasonable to discuss methods for closing the loophole through changes in the law. That said, Taylor added that "churn" among the insured population has been a longstanding concern even before the Affordable Care Act was passed. "That is why it is a tricky problem to address," he said. "If it was the same people all the time, it would be relatively easy to fix." Our ruling Walden said, "One of the issues we found is that some people were gaming the system" by paying "for nine months of insurance, get 12 -- the other three for free." A nine-month loophole exists, and experts say it’s fair to assume that some people might be exploiting it. But among the universe of people who have purchased insurance under the law, the percentage doing so is almost certainly small. Meanwhile, Walden’s assertion frames it as a certainty that the intention is to game the system, when in fact the study cited by his office didn’t probe that as a motivation. We rate the claim Mostly False. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Greg Walden | null | null | null | 2017-03-08T16:14:59 | 2017-03-07 | ['None'] |
abbc-00317 | The claim: Opposition Leader Bill Shorten claims the Federal Government has cut $1 billion from childcare. | in-between | http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-02/childcare-funding-cuts/6253304 | The claim: Opposition Leader Bill Shorten claims the Federal Government has cut $1 billion from childcare. | ['government-and-politics', 'child-care', 'alp', 'bill-shorten', 'australia'] | null | null | ['government-and-politics', 'child-care', 'alp', 'bill-shorten', 'australia'] | Fact check: Did the Abbott Government cut $1 billion from child care? | Thu 3 Mar 2016, 6:01am | null | ['Bill_Shorten'] |
snes-03001 | Steve Bannon once described himself a "Leninist" who wanted to destroy the state. | unproven | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bannon-leninist-destroy-state/ | null | Politics | null | Dan Evon | null | Did Steve Bannon Describe Himself as a ‘Leninist’ Who Wants to Destroy the State? | 3 February 2017 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03440 | Steven Curis Chapman’s daughter accidentally killed in family driveway | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/chapman/ | null | religious | null | null | null | Steven Curis Chapman’s daughter accidentally killed in family driveway | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02686 | Are 'Sandfalls' in Saudi Arabia Real? | mostly true | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/saudi-arabia-sandfalls/ | null | Uncategorized | null | Dan Evon | null | Are ‘Sandfalls’ in Saudi Arabia Real? | 4 April 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-09630 | I haven't missed a vote since 1993. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jan/06/chuck-grassley/grassley-claims-he-hasnt-missed-vote-1993/ | Senators love to boast about their voting records, and Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, is no exception. During a weekly conference call with Iowa reporters, Grassley was asked about his re-election prospects this year. "I'm going to have tough competition," he said of his three opponents. "Even though there's suggestions at the national level that this could be a very Republican year, I can't assume that it's going to be a very Republican year. And I'm going to have to campaign very, very hard. ... For instance, I haven't missed a vote since 1993. I hope I don't have to miss any votes this year because of a campaign." Has Grassley really been so steadfast? We had to limit our investigation to roll call votes; in the Senate, less controversial bills or amendments are frequently adopted by unanimous consent or by voice vote, meaning members simply say "aye" or "nay." First, we turned to Congressional Quarterly , a publication that annually studies lawmakers' voting records. According to CQ 's Web site, Grassley has had a flawless voting record since 1993. The Washington Post also compiles similar information, and we found that Grassley hasn't been absent for a vote since he missed four votes on July 14, 1993. (Those votes pertained to a bill that would allow federal employees to participate in the political process so long as it was done outside of work.) What kept Grassley from the Senate floor that day in 1993? Flooding in Iowa, according to the Des Moines Register, noting that the senator has become "the iron man of the Senate racking up ... 5,700 consecutive votes." Indeed, as an average, Grassley has voted about 99.6 percent of the time since he took office in 1981. Other senators elected at the same time cannot tout such near-perfect records. For example, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has, on average, voted 93 percent of the time in the last 28 years, first as a Republican then as a Democrat. And Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, has voted on average about 90.7 percent of the time. Grassley has gone to great lengths to maintain his record. When, for example, a blizzard threatened Washington, D.C., on the eve of a crucial health care overhaul vote on Dec. 19, 2009, Grassley spent the night in his office to make sure he didn't miss it. "Bc of potential blizzard I've come to office to sleep," he Tweeted the night of the 18th. "Vote at 720am vote Sat. Hv not missed vote 7/93. 5700 votes consecutive." Grassley said he hadn't missed a vote since 1993, which is certainly correct for every recorded vote. Grassley has every right to brag. We give him a True. | null | Chuck Grassley | null | null | null | 2010-01-06T15:29:03 | 2009-12-30 | ['None'] |
snes-05499 | A judge has called for the FBI and U.S. Marshals to arrest the President. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/judge-arrest-the-president-congress/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | FALSE: Judge Calls U.S. Marshals, FBI to Arrest the President and Congress | 11 December 2015 | null | ['United_States', 'Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation'] |
hoer-00736 | Cocoa Mulch Toxic to Dogs Warning Email | true messages | https://www.hoax-slayer.com/cocoa-mulch-warning.html | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | Cocoa Mulch Toxic to Dogs Warning Email | 16th April 2010 | null | ['None'] |
tron-03229 | Georgia Judge Hears Case To Strike Barack Obama From Presidential Primary Ballot | truth! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/obama-georgia-ballot-case/ | null | politics | null | null | null | Georgia Judge Hears Case To Strike Barack Obama From Presidential Primary Ballot | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02660 | In the wake of a missile strike ordered by President Trump on Syria in April 2017, senior White House officials admitted that it served no actual purpose. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-house-syria-publicity/ | null | Politics | null | David Emery | null | White House Admits Syria Missile Attack Was a Publicity Stunt to Make Trump Look Good? | 8 April 2017 | null | ['White_House', 'Syria'] |
goop-02665 | Kim Kardashian Urging Kanye West To Record “Diss Track” About Beyonce & Jay Z, | 2 | https://www.gossipcop.com/kim-kardashian-urging-kanye-west-diss-song-beyonce-jay-z-revenge/ | null | null | null | Michael Lewittes | null | Kim Kardashian NOT Urging Kanye West To Record “Diss Track” About Beyonce & Jay Z, Despite Report | 1:58 pm, July 16, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
goop-00033 | REP: Jennifer Aniston ‘Anxious’ Or ‘Nervous’ To Return To TV, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-return-tv-anxious-not-true/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | REP: Jennifer Aniston NOT ‘Anxious’ Or ‘Nervous’ To Return To TV, Despite Report | 10:44 am, November 6, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
farg-00382 | “VP Mike Pence Busted Stealing Campaign Funds To Pay His Mortgage.” | misleading | https://www.factcheck.org/2018/09/partisan-site-revives-old-pence-controversy/ | null | fake-news | FactCheck.org | Saranac Hale Spencer | ['campaign finance'] | Partisan Site Revives Old Pence Controversy | September 7, 2018 | 2018-09-07 23:02:53 UTC | ['None'] |
goop-02386 | Blake Shelton “Disappointed” Luke Bryan Joined “American Idol,” | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/blake-shelton-disappointed-luke-bryan-joined-american-idol/ | null | null | null | Holly Nicol | null | Blake Shelton NOT “Disappointed” Luke Bryan Joined “American Idol,” Despite Report | 11:06 am, October 4, 2017 | null | ['Blake_Shelton', 'American_Idol'] |
pomt-10869 | You know we can't just pull out now... The truth of the matter is: If we started today, it would take one year, one year to get 160,000 troops physically out of Iraq, logistically. | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2007/aug/27/joe-biden/biden-right-no-fast-way-out/ | U.S. commanders say it would be a lengthy process, and independent military analysts have said it would take about a year to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq safely. It could be done faster, but with larger U.S. casualties and more abandoned equipment, experts say. McClatchy Newspapers has reported that a simulation conducted by the Pentagon since the debate suggested a retreat could take as little as six months, but critics said that estimate is overly optimistic. "We must consider the complexity of the threat and deliberately reduce our forces based on the situation on the ground as well as the capability of the Iraqi security forces," Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the deputy commander of forces in Iraq, said at a briefing this month. "I think the plan will reflect that as we develop it." | null | Joe Biden | null | null | null | 2007-08-27T00:00:00 | 2007-08-23 | ['Iraq'] |
tron-00347 | The terrorist flight number that tells the story in graphics | fiction! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/flightnumber/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | The terrorist flight number that tells the story in graphics | Mar 16, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02037 | In July 2017, President Trump dispatched federal investigators to the hamlet of Islamberg, New York, where they uncovered "America's worst nightmare". | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/islamberg-raid/ | null | Politics | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Did President Trump Send Feds to Raid Islamberg, New York? | 19 July 2017 | null | ['United_States', 'New_York_City'] |
snes-01395 | Viral Photographs Show Libyan Slave Trade? | miscaptioned | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/libya-slavery/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan MacGuill | null | Do These Photographs Depict the Libyan Slave Trade? | 29 November 2017 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-07368 | House Republican plan would increase costs for Oregon seniors by $6,000 with health care vouchers instead of Medicare | mostly true | /oregon/statements/2011/may/06/david-wu/david-wu-highlights-worries-over-paul-ryans-medica/ | Medicare is the federal program that provides health care to 46.5 million Americans (including 511,450 in Oregon) and remains one of the country’s most popular but expensive programs. It’s also something less obvious - a potent political tool that candidates use often to help their chances. It’s especially true for embattled candidates looking for some medicine of their own. Which leads us to Rep. David Wu, the incumbent Democrat from Oregon’s 1st district whose erratic behavior in the weeks before Election Day last year triggered the departure of several senior staffers and questions about his chances to win re-election in 2012. In an April 21 press release, Wu warned that seniors in his district would face $6,000 in higher annual health care costs if a Republican budget proposal is passed. "Amazingly, House Republicans think they can get away with plans to increase costs for Oregon seniors by $6,000, issuing health care vouchers in order to give millionaires another $200,000 in tax breaks," Wu says in his press release. It’s an inflammatory statement designed to energize seniors and Medicare supporters to rally against the budget written by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis. As a byproduct, Wu is also hoping that defeating the budget plan will bring votes his way in 2012. On May 5, 2011, senior Republicans conceded that a deal with Democrats on Medicare was virtually impossible. But let’s examine the math behind Wu's suggestion. Ryan’s proposal aimed to balance the budget by cutting spending $5.8 trillion over 10 years, reforming taxes and restraining the growth of the most costly entitlement programs - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Right now, Medicare is a "fee for service" program, which means if you qualify for coverage the program will pay your health care provider for each procedure or visit. Ryan wanted instead a subsidy that will pay part - but probably not all - the cost of a person’s health care insurance. "Beginning in 2022, all newly-eligible Medicare beneficiaries (i.e., individuals turning 65 as well as younger, disabled individuals becoming eligible for Medicare) would only have access to health coverage through private insurance plans, rather than through the current government-run Medicare program," an analysis in April by the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation said. "Under the new premium support system … the government would make payments directly to private health plans on behalf of Medicare-eligible enrollees, rather than pay hospitals, physicians, and other medical providers directly for the services. …If the government payments to plans on behalf of enrollees were insufficient to cover premiums and/or other costs, beneficiaries would be responsible for additional costs," Kaiser says. This is where Wu’s math comes in, with help from Kaiser and the Congressional Budget Office. Wu says the $6,000 higher cost per year is the difference between the amount of the federal voucher and the likely cost of health insurance purchased on the open market. CBO says that the most generous $8,000 voucher provided by Ryan’s plan would cover 39 percent of the cost of the average private plan for a 65-year-old in 2022. Which means the plan actually costs about $20,500 and that beneficiaries would be on the hook for about $12,500 of the cost. According to calculations by the CBO and Kaiser, a typical beneficiary would have to pay $6,150 out-of-pocket in 2022 if Medicare essentially remains the same as today. Under Ryan’s plan that out-of-pocket cost would have jumped to $12,500, which is an increase of $6,350. Ryan argues that Wu and other critics, including President Barack Obama, do not take into account the effect millions of new customers flooding a market will have. He figures competition will lower prices as insurers battle to capture new business underwritten with government subsidies. "Medicare is projected to go bankrupt in just nine years unless we act to curb the relentlessly rising cost of health care," Ryan wrote in an April 24 op-ed published by The Washington Post. "This cannot be done with across-the-board cuts in Washington. It has to be done by giving seniors the tools to fight back against skyrocketing costs. That’s why our budget saves Medicare by using competition to weed out inefficient providers, improve the quality of health care for seniors and drive costs down." He and his allies also point out that Medicare costs are growing explosively and if not addressed the program will require deep cuts or higher out of pocket costs. Regardless of the uncertainties, there is strong evidence that people who reach age 65 in 10 years and begin using Medicare would certainly pay more under Ryan’s plan than they would if they became eligible today. Is the difference $6,000 or more? Could it be less? The answer to each is perhaps. But given current knowledge and calculations $6,000 is a number that can be defended. For that reason, we rate Wu’s claim Mostly True. | null | David Wu | null | null | null | 2011-05-06T06:00:00 | 2011-04-15 | ['Oregon', 'Republican_Party_(United_States)'] |
hoer-01111 | iPhone Giveaway | facebook scams | https://www.hoax-slayer.net/more-iphone-giveaway-scams-hitting-facebook/ | null | null | null | Brett M. Christensen | null | More iPhone Giveaway Scams Hitting Facebook | August 24, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-01882 | A photograph shows a rainbow-colored mountain range in California. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rainbow-mountains-real/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | Are These Rainbow Mountains Real? | 18 August 2017 | null | ['California'] |
pomt-00397 | Someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws? | false | /truth-o-meter/statements/2018/sep/05/donald-trump/donald-trump-inaccurately-describes-libel-law/ | Donald Trump has been talking about changing libel laws since before he was elected president. "I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money," Trump said at a February rally in Fort Worth, Texas. "We're going to open up those libel laws." Trump returned to this theme following the release of excerpts from Fear: Trump in the White House, a new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that paints Trump and his White House in a negative light. "Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost," Trump tweeted on Sept. 5 "Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?" See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com If Trump wants to change libel law, he needs a more accurate understanding of what the current law states. The law does not currently protect people who "totally make up stories." (The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.) Some basics about libel law The broad legal category of "defamation" includes both libel, which takes the form of writing, and slander, which takes the form of spoken words. Generally speaking, if a person believes that someone else’s statements have caused injury to their reputation, they can sue, claiming defamation. The law makes a distinction that’s relevant to Trump’s situation: If the person alleging defamation is a public figure, they must clear a higher bar than for ordinary individuals to prove that defamation has occurred. The unanimous 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in New York Times vs. Sullivan holds that the First Amendment generally protects even false statements about public officials and public figures. But it does not protect statements made with "actual malice," which means that the publication knew they were false and published the material anyway, or that they were published with reckless disregard to whether the material was true or false. Would current libel standards cover the example Trump tweeted about? Experts told us Trump’s scenario of someone who would "totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact" would be subject to current defamation laws. "The president's tweet clearly assumes a situation where two things are the case," said Leonard M. Niehoff, a University of Michigan law professor. "First, that the person has ‘totally’ and intentionally ‘made the information up’ — it’s not an instance of a mistake but of deliberate fabrication. And second, that the statement made is one of ‘fact’ and so is capable of being proved true or false, rather than being an opinion or a belief." Given this scenario, Niehoff said, the law of defamation gives the aggrieved party a claim. "Even under the highly protective standard of New York Times vs. Sullivan, a public official or figure would have a claim under these circumstances because this meets the test for ‘actual malice,’" Niehoff said. "So to the extent that the president is describing the state of the law, he is simply and objectively wrong." Of course, the plaintiff in Trump’s example would have to do more than just assert their case. They would have to prove it in court. This is a high bar but not an impossible one. "Casebooks are filled with examples of people who have successfully used libel law to challenge false statements and portrayals in articles, books and movies," said David Ardia, co-director of the University of North Carolina Center for Media Law and Policy. In 2003, for instance, Tom Cruise won a $10 million judgment in a defamation case against an "erotic wrestler" who claimed he’d had a gay affair with the actor. In 2017, a jury awarded three far less famous plaintiffs with $247 million after it found a highway billboard operated by New Hampshire mortgage broker Michael Gill featured defamatory statements about them. Much more common than outright court victories, however, are defamation cases that lead to a monetary settlement between the parties. This effectively makes defamation law a tool to produce a "retribution or cost" against the alleged perpetrator without having to win a case in court. Examples of celebrities who have reached such settlements include actress Katie Holmes and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. Alternately, a plaintiff could file a suit under the "tort of false light," said Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Such lawsuits cover embarrassment from a misleading or untrue implication. Trump’s use of the phrase "form a picture of a person" does sound like the way false light claims are often framed, Niehoff said. But if this is what Trump intended, he said, it only makes his tweet doubly wrong, because there would be two potential claims — defamation and false light — that would be available to the aggrieved party, at least in the states in which false light suits are allowed. About the only way a defamer could "get away with it without retribution or cost" if the target of the alleged defamation fails to file a lawsuit challenging it, or if they hire a lawyer who isn’t strong enough to win the case. But legal experts don’t consider this to be a significant caveat. "The system makes ‘retribution’ — or, as we lawyers fondly call it, ‘justice’ — available, but that always comes in the form of an opportunity, not a guarantee," Niehoff said. Ironically, Trump himself is currently the defendant in a defamation suit filed by Summer Zervos, a former contestant on his television show, The Apprentice, who has alleged that Trump had groped her. Trump denied Zervos’ allegation on multiple occasions, which prompted her to respond with the defamation suit. "His brutalizing of her a second time — this time falsely condemning her to the world as a liar for having the temerity to reveal his earlier unwanted sexual groping of her body — directly caused serious injury," her attorneys argued in court filings. Given Trump’s legal exposure, Niehoff said, "perhaps he should be careful what he wishes for" in his tweets about defamation law. Our ruling Trump tweeted that "someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost." This is not accurate. Anyone who alleges defamation from a fabricated and inaccurate account could sue under at least one and possibly two legal doctrines, and if they did, they would have a good chance of prevailing at trial — even a public figure like Trump, who would have to meet a higher legal standard. We rate the statement False. See Figure 2 on PolitiFact.com | null | Donald Trump | null | null | null | 2018-09-05T17:16:06 | 2018-09-05 | ['None'] |
pomt-01041 | You cannot build a little guy up by tearing a big guy down -- Abraham Lincoln said it. | pants on fire! | /truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jan/25/john-kasich/did-abraham-lincoln-say-you-cannot-build-little-gu/ | In his argument against President Barack Obama’s proposed increase in capital gains tax, Ohio Gov. John Kasich invoked the words of a vaunted former president -- or at least he tried. Obama wants to create a nationwide free community college program. How he proposes to pay for it -- partially by increasing taxes on the wealthy via a higher tax rate on income earned from selling assets -- would be "a prescription for economic slowdown," Kasich, a Republican, said on Fox News Sunday Jan. 25. To support his position, he relayed a quote that he said comes from former President Abraham Lincoln. "You can’t build a little guy up by tearing the big guy down," Kasich said. "Abraham Lincoln said it then, and he’s right." There’s only one problem. Lincoln never said that. The true author is Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, a minister-turned-public speaker, born in 1873, eight years after Lincoln was killed. After he left the pulpit, Boetcker, a political conservative, negotiated labor relations. In 1916, Boetcker published the list of "10 Cannots," a collection of personal truisms largely centered around the benefits of laissez-faire capitalism. The axioms have been mistakenly attributed to Lincoln for decades. Here are all 10 Cannots (Kasich used No. 3.): 1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. 2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. 3. You cannot help little men by tearing down big men. 4. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. 5. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. 6. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. 7. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. 8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. 9. You cannot build character and courage by destroying men's initiative and independence. 10. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves. So why do Kasich and others these quotes to Lincoln? It stems from Boetcker himself, according to Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions about Abraham Lincoln, a book by Gerald Prokopowicz, a Lincoln expert at East Carolina University. In 1916, Boetcker published leaflets that had a real Lincoln quote on one side and his "cannots" on the other. A reader could easily assume these were also Lincoln quotes, and they did. Kasich’s spokesman pointed us to the fact that in 1950, Rep. Frances Bolton, R-Ohio, read the 10 Cannots into the Congressional Record. She supposedly got them from one of the earliest talk show hosts, Galen Drake. A 1950 Library of Congress report said of the frequent misquotation, "There seems to be no way of overtaking the rapid pace with which the mistaken identity has been spreading," according to a 1992 Washington Post column. Probably the most well-documented misuse of these quotes came from Reagan at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. Reagan said, "What (Democrats) truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: ‘You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.’ " So we’ve established that Lincoln did not say that line Kasich used to support his position against raising taxes on the wealthy -- "You cannot help little men by tearing down big men." But we were left wondering if, in any case, does this at all line up with Lincoln’s position on taxes? As it turns out, not really. Lincoln and taxes Well, Lincoln signed the first federal income taxes into law in 1861 in order to fund the Civil War. What’s more is that these taxes were progressive -- meaning that the wealthier people paid higher tax rates on their income. The highest rate -- 5 percent -- applied to incomes roughly equivalent to $1 million today, Prokopowicz told PolitiFact in an email. "To the extent that signing the bill indicated his approval, Lincoln thus approved of the concept of higher taxes on the wealthy," he said. "This is consistent with Lincoln's politics generally." (Quick note: Kasich was talking about capital gains taxes specifically, and here we’re talking about income tax. Until 1921, capital gains were taxed at the same rate as ordinary income.) Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase came up with the idea for the tax, which is further evidence that Lincoln supported higher taxes on the wealthy, said Geoff Elliot, expert and author of the Abraham Lincoln Blog. He added that a subsequent act in 1862 created the precursor to the Internal Revenue Service Much of the debate over the Civil War income tax laws centered around whether Lincoln had the constitutional authority to impose these taxes, said Jennifer Weber, a Lincoln expert at the University of Kansas. (In 1881, the Supreme Court held up Lincoln’s authority.) In a reminder of how much political parties have changed, Weber noted that it was the conservative Democrats taking Lincoln, a Republican, to task over executive overreach and implementing taxes. There is "precious little" record of Lincoln’s views on taxes, said Ed Steers, author of several books on the Lincoln assassination. But he pointed us to a speech Lincoln delivered to the 164th Ohio Infantry in 1864, where he advocated for the progressive tax law. Lincoln said: "It is fair that each man shall pay taxes in exact proportion to the value of his property; but if we should wait before collecting a tax, to adjust the taxes on each man in exact proportion with every other man, we should never collect any tax at all. " Prokopowicz added that Lincoln believed strongly in "opportunity capitalism" and that the government should not adopt policies that would prevent anyone from acquiring wealth. However, Lincoln also believed that the government had a vital role in creating opportunity, and individuals ought to contribute to the government in order to reap its benefits. "I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens," Lincoln wrote in 1836 while running for the Illinois state Legislature. Our ruling Kasich said that Lincoln said, "You can’t build a little guy up by tearing the big guy down." It’s well-established that this is not a Lincoln quote. Many have misattributed it to Lincoln, but its real author was a politically conservative minister and public speaker who was born several years after Lincoln’s assassination. Additionally, Kasich used the idea to support his position against raising taxes on the wealthy. Lincoln, however, instituted the first-ever federal income tax, and it was progressive. We rate this claim Pants on Fire. | null | John Kasich | null | null | null | 2015-01-25T16:01:58 | 2015-01-25 | ['None'] |
goop-01365 | Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt Finally Out Of Hiding? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-brad-pitt-hiding-spotted/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt Finally Out Of Hiding? | 6:04 pm, March 18, 2018 | null | ['Jennifer_Aniston', 'Brad_Pitt'] |
pomt-04291 | Says Mark Hass "raised your taxes by $1 billion in a single day." | half-true | /oregon/statements/2012/nov/01/taxpayer-association-oregon/did-sen-mark-hass-raise-taxes-1-billion-single-day/ | Sometimes elections can start to feel a little like a song on repeat: Same candidates, same issues, same talking points -- over and over again. That’s the case with a legislative attack we first saw in 2010 that claimed Senate Majority Leader Richard Devlin, D-Tualatin, had raised "your taxes by $1 billion in a single day." Back then, we called the claim Half True. Well, the attack is back this year -- only this time we found the mailer from the Taxpayer Association of Oregon targeting Mark Hass, a Beaverton Democrat. (The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm says it’s also being used against Sen. Laurie Monnes Anderson of Gresham and Rep. Arnie Roblan, the Democratic co-speaker from Coos Bay.) A quick look at our previous PolitiFact reveals the ad has not changed much over the past couple years. Much as it had originally, the mailer breaks the tax increase down to the second, noting that raising taxes by $1 billion in a single day comes down to more than $41 million an hour, or nearly $700,000 a minute, or $11,574 each second. And the question asked on the other side of the mailer is, "Can we afford four more years of" whichever candidate is being targeted. The mailer also cites the same three taxes, House Bill 2649, 3405 and 2116, but adds a new one for this election -- HB 2001. Here’s what PolitiFact found last time regarding the first three bills: "House Bill 2649 created two new tax brackets, including a 10.8 percent bracket for joint filers with income above $250,000 and for single filers with income above $125,000. For tax years after 2011, the rate is scheduled to drop to 9.9 percent. The bill also phased out some federal tax deductions. The Legislative Revenue Office estimated it would raise taxes for 2.5 percent of full-year individual filers (38,000) and 6.1 percent of returns (25,600) that report business income or loss. The proposal was projected to raise $472 million in 2009-11; it became Measure 66 in the January 2010 special election. "House Bill 3405 raised the corporate minimum tax from $10 -- first set in 1931 and untouched until 2009 -- to a sliding scale of $150 to $100,000 depending on sales in Oregon. The $10 minimum for S-corporations went from $10 to $150. The bill also created a second tax rate of 7.9 percent and implemented filing fees. The Legislative Revenue Office estimated this would affect more than 75 percent of C-corporations and nearly all 62,000 S-corporations. The proposal was projected to raise $261 million in 2009-11; it became Measure 67 in the January 2010 special election. House Bill 2116 we explained this way: "This proposal did two things. One, it levied a 1 percent tax on insurers, projected to raise more than $115 million in 2009-11 to insure 80,000 children. Two, it replaced an expiring tax paid by hospitals, and was projected to raise $300 million for low-income adults without health care. Hospitals, the entities paying the tax, actually backed the legislation because it would allow them to recoup more money from Medicaid. Two Republicans joined all 18 Democrats in the Senate to approve this bill." Together, those bills get us over the $1 billion mark. This year, the mailer also includes HB 2001 for good measure. This bill increased the gas tax to 30 cents from 24 cents. The increase kicked in back in January 2011 and raised about $300 million in new revenue. Altogether, the measures definitely boosted the state’s bottom line by more than $1 billion. But, as we noted two years ago, there are some significant caveats here. First, it’s not necessarily accurate to hang all of these taxes exclusively on the heads of these candidates. With House Bill 2649 and 3405 in particular, the lawmakers had the help of voters. Anti-tax activists referred those two measures to the ballot, but a majority of Oregonians voted to keep the new taxes and so they remain. It’s also worth noting that the gas tax increase, while not referred to voters, passed on a bipartisan vote in both chambers. Second, aside from the gas tax, these are not taxes that would hit the pocketbooks of the average Joe -- at least not directly. PolitiFact Oregon accepts that such taxes could affect employees and consumer prices as well as health care costs, but the ad makes the taxes seem much more direct. Third, while we understand the place of hyperbole in campaigns, the per-second breakdown makes it sound as though these candidates are raising taxes "at an unbelievable clip," as we noted two years ago. Finally, we can’t help but point out that these taxes weren’t, in fact, passed on the same day -- the gas tax came earlier, and at least one version of the mailer lumps it in with the others. We called Jason Williams of the Taxpayer Association of Oregon to see what he thought about our initial ruling -- and the context we’d pointed out. His opinion hasn’t changed much since we had this conversation two years ago. The taxes will hit people, whether at the pump, in their insurance plans or at their place of employment. "Every time somebody taxes someone it is a negative impact on somebody's life," he said. "It limits their spending power, it limits their freedom." Voters wouldn’t have been asked to approve any taxes if the Legislature hadn’t passed them in the first place, he said. Williams also noted that Hass, in particular, has voted to raise taxes by nearly a billion dollars twice before -- and voters ultimately rejected those increases. He agreed context is important, but noted that the bill numbers and years of passage were included in the mailer. The last time we looked at this claim, we gave it a Half True. We noted then, as we do now, that while lawmakers did vote for $1 billion in new taxes in a single day, there were some important details missing -- the timing of the taxes, who had approved them and who was being taxed. The mailer’s statements deserve some additional clarity, but we don’t think they ignore critical facts. We rate this claim Half True. | null | Taxpayer Association of Oregon | null | null | null | 2012-11-01T15:19:50 | 2012-10-30 | ['None'] |
snes-06160 | Holiday turkey preparation provides set-up for humorous scenarios. | legend | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thanksgiving-turkey-stories/ | null | Holidays | null | David Mikkelson | null | Thanksgiving Turkey Stories | 23 November 2006 | null | ['None'] |
pomt-02679 | Says the media created the term "polar vortex" and the cold air proves "the ice isn’t melting." | pants on fire! | /punditfact/statements/2014/jan/08/rush-limbaugh/limbaugh-polar-vortex-made-yet-still-proof-ice-cap/ | Those images of polar bears stranded atop tiny glaciers, looking very sad about their melting home in the North Pole, are phony, says radio host Rush Limbaugh. The lefty media created them to drive the discussion on global warming, which is also phony, he says. You know what else is phony, says Limbaugh? The "polar vortex" chilling much of the country with record low temperatures (though not really colder ones than on Mars). The media is playing it up as an extreme, counterintuitive consequence of a warming planet as part of its global warming "hoax," Limbaugh said, when the polar blast really proves just the opposite. "We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country," he said during his Jan. 6 show. "And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’ The dreaded polar vortex." "Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have you ever heard of it? Well, they just created it for this week." Here’s part of how he broke it down for his audience: "See, normally the polar vortex stays up there in the polar region, but something is causing it to dip down like it's never happened before. We've never had arctic air blasts before. And remember, now, the key to all this is you have to understand one of the fundamental concepts of man-made global warming is ice melting at the poles. "One of the ways they have always sought to convince you that the world is warming is not the climate where you live, but rather where you aren't, where you can't see what is really happening. So they tell you the ice is melting at the North Pole and the South Pole. And then they publish pictures, which are fraudulent pictures, of poor little polar bears stranded on three square feet of ice that you are told used to be the North Pole. "... Well, obviously there is no melting of ice going on at the North Pole. If they're gonna tell us the polar vortex is responsible for this cold, that means record cold is also happening in the North Pole, which means there isn't any ice melting." We’ve heard several political commentators, errantly, call into question the validity of global warming given the week’s record-breaking low temperatures. Limbaugh takes it further, dubious of both global warming and the polar vortex itself. PunditFact wanted to know: Does the unusual blast of cool air, which he says the media ginned up as the "dreaded polar vortex," disprove global warming? "Polar vortex" may sound new to Limbaugh, journalists and anyone who is not a weather expert, but it’s not a term the media cooked up to scare you. It’s been part of the conversation in meteorology circles since at least the 1940s and ‘50s, experts told us. The polar vortex is the region in the northern hemisphere that contains the planet’s cold or Arctic air. A warmer atmosphere lies outside of the vortex. The boundary between the regions is a jet stream of strong, fast-moving, frigid winds. Sometimes the jet stream is more symmetrical, encircling the polar region in an oval without many bumps. Other times, especially this week, its rotation breaks off into deep troughs, ushering cold air to the south. A polar outbreak occurs in areas that have big drops in temperature, where the polar vortex has dipped pronouncedly south. This jet stream has become more wavy in the last five years, sending more cold air to the eastern U.S. and eastern Asia, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It has been with us for eons," said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "It will be with us for eons to come." Now, whether this week’s polar outbreak is a result of global warming is a matter of active scientific debate. Rutgers University climate researcher Jennifer Francis co-authored a 2012 research paper arguing the loss of Arctic ice leads to more extremes -- not just more frigid winters for the east coast, but also record warm temperatures in Alaska, record drought in California, storms in the United Kingdom, and a warm winter for Scandinavia. "This sort of jet stream pattern is what we expect to occur more often as the Arctic continues to warm faster than the rest of the globe in response to increasing greenhouse gases," she said. "We can't say this particular event is caused by climate change, but it is becoming clearer that this sort of pattern should become more likely in the future." On his show, Limbaugh skewered a Daily Beast article with the headline "Thank Global Warming for Freezing You Right Now," but the article actually couches the connection more than its flashy headline suggests: "As crazy as it sounds, global warming may be at least partly to blame. This particular aspect of climate change science is not yet definitive, but here's what may be going on." Serreze says it is too early to tell whether one-time weather events like this polar outbreak are happening as a result of global warming. That said, the polar outbreak definitely does not disprove that Arctic sea ice is not melting, as Limbaugh concludes. Sea ice at the North Pole is obviously not melting right this second. That’s because it’s January, and the pole is in darkness all day and night. But Arctic sea ice is almost at a record low for this time of year, Francis pointed out, even though it is up from 2012, the record low year. Scientists look at long-term trends, not annual shifts, to base their conclusions. Alarm over shrinking sea ice is based on how the region is shedding more and more of it by the end of summer -- as less ice covers the Arctic Ocean, the ocean absorbs more warmth. Historically, ice covering the Arctic sea is twice as big as the continental United States by winter’s end in March, Serreze said. As the ocean warms, ice melts. Around 1980, sea ice by summer’s end in September covered as much area as the contiguous United States, Serreze said. Lately, it’s shrunk to an area smaller than the size of the United States west of the Mississippi River. "The long-term trend in Arctic sea ice is sharply downwards, and this trend has the capability to cause significant alterations in jet stream behavior that can cause an increase in both warm and cold extreme events in the winter," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground. Serreze labeled Limbaugh’s connection between the cold snap and sea ice as "absurd." Our ruling Limbaugh claimed the media made up the "polar vortex" to bolster global warming. What the cold snap does prove, he says, is Arctic sea ice is not melting -- that global warming is a hoax. Climate scientists told us his rant is wildly misinformed. The polar vortex has been a part of science for decades, and it certainly does not prove that sea ice is not melting. We rate this Pants on Fire! | null | Rush Limbaugh | null | null | null | 2014-01-08T12:33:47 | 2014-01-06 | ['None'] |
pomt-12644 | We have counties where there have been one arrest under the SAFE Act. It indicates there's not a whole lot of interest in enforcing this in our upstate counties. | half-true | /new-york/statements/2017/mar/24/marc-butler/most-safe-act-arrests-have-been-new-york-city/ | Republican lawmakers in Albany are pushing a new proposal to repeal New York state’s 2013 gun control law, the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, or SAFE Act. They want to repeal the law only in counties outside New York City. It would remain on the books for the city’s five boroughs. Marc Butler, a Republican Assemblyman from the North Country, claims the law is not effective upstate. "We did a random survey of some of the counties," Butler said. "We have counties where there have been one arrest under the SAFE Act. It indicates there's not a whole lot of interest in enforcing this in our upstate counties." Is Butler right that some counties have only had one SAFE Act violation in four years? And is there "not a whole lot of interest in enforcing this" in upstate counties? The SAFE Act The SAFE Act passed the New York State Legislature in a whirlwind January 2013 vote, soon after 26 people -- 20 students and six adults -- were shot and killed on Dec. 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The SAFE Act places additional regulations on gun owners and dealers on what guns need to be registered, how guns can be bought and sold, and how those guns can be used. The law expanded the definition of what’s considered an assault weapon in New York state and required those guns to be registered. The law also required almost universal background checks on gun sales in New York state. The law requires anyone who wants to buy a gun to make the sale through a federally licensed dealer. Those dealers are required to perform background checks before approving the sale. Before the SAFE Act, residents were able to privately buy or sell guns without any background checks. Now, even if someone wants to give a gun to a family member or neighbor, it has to go through a federal dealer. Downstate arrests Since the law's passage, there have been 11,893 arrests for SAFE Act violations in New York state through Feb. 17, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. A disproportionate number of the arrests happened in New York City. Some 9,593 arrests were made in New York City compared with 1,641 arrests upstate and 659 arrests on Long Island or in the suburban Westchester and Rockland counties. New York City has the most SAFE Act arrests per capita with one arrest for every 692 people in the city. Long Island and the city's suburbs recorded one arrest for every 4,838 adults. Upstate arrests In upstate New York, there has been one SAFE Act arrest for every 3,411 adults since 2013. Erie County’s 254 arrests were the most among upstate counties. That's one SAFE Act arrest for every 2,870 adults in the county. Onondaga County had a higher SAFE Act arrest rate: one arrest for every 1,579 adults. Albany County had one arrest for every 5,400 residents and Monroe County had one arrest for every 3,514 adults. The arrests in most of those counties were concentrated in their largest cities. Buffalo had 78 percent of Erie County's arrests. Rochester had 81 percent of Monroe County's arrests. And, Syracuse had 87 percent of the arrests in Onondaga County. Albany County was the exception with only 48 percent of the county's arrests happening in the city of Albany. Some 172 arrests were in Oneida County, the fourth most upstate, and it had a rate of one arrest for every 1,066 adults. Oneida County District Attorney Scott McNamara says he treats the SAFE Act like any other law. "Whether I politically agree with a certain section of the law, or I don’t agree with it, I don’t let that affect what I do," McNamara said. "What I do professionally and what I might think or talk about at breakfast with my wife are two different things. I leave my personal opinions to the side." Eight counties, all upstate, had fewer than five SAFE Act arrests since the law took effect: Allegany, Chemung, Columbia, Hamilton, Schuyler, Wyoming, Tioga, and Lewis counties. Tioga and Lewis counties reported no SAFE Act arrests at all. Wyoming County is the only county with just one SAFE Act arrest. In that case, the offender gave a gun to someone not legally allowed to own one. "We aren't seeing the violations," Wyoming County Sheriff Gregory Rudolph said. But law enforcement officials say they are not ignoring the law. People are obeying the law. "To say our numbers are low because of lacking enforcement, we’re turning a blind eye? Never," Hamilton County Sheriff Karl Abrams said. "It’s definitely less violators than downstate. They do everything by the book. They don’t do illegal transfers. They don’t do anything like that." Our ruling Butler said "we have counties where there have been one arrest under the SAFE Act. It indicates there's not a whole lot of interest in enforcing this in our upstate counties." One county does indeed have just one arrest under the SAFE Act, and a handful of others have few arrests. But some upstate counties have large numbers of arrests. And even where there have been few arrests, law enforcement officials believe those numbers have more to do with residents complying with the law than authorities' lack of enthusiasm for enforcing it. We rate his claim as Half True. See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com | null | Marc Butler | null | null | null | 2017-03-24T16:48:57 | 2017-03-01 | ['None'] |
pomt-07972 | Gov. Scott Walker hired convicted Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen to oversee a raid on the state employee retirement system to help balance the state budget. | pants on fire! | /wisconsin/statements/2011/jan/21/chain-email/chain-e-mail-claims-gov-scott-walker-hired-convict/ | In some circles in Wisconsin, especially government workers, an e-mail has been ricocheting from in-box to in-box making an eye-popping claim. In short: Gov. Scott Walker hired convicted Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen to oversee a raid on the state employee retirement system to help balance the state budget. The claim is presented in what appears to be a news article by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Lee Bergquist. it is meant to mimic an online story, complete with a Jan. 13, 2011 date and a tally of reader comments. At one point, it jumped from e-mails to the Internet, briefly appearing on a Little Chute teachers union website. The story is a fake. And the statement is false, ridiculously so. But the episode gives us a chance to explore, as best we can, how the piece -- apparently an attempt at satire -- made it into the public sphere. In some ways, this is a political version of e-mails we see -- and pass along -- all the time. You know, jokes about why the Chicago Bears still suck, or silly pictures taken of customers at Walmart. This one left some people taking the claim seriously -- calling the governor’s office, state union leaders and the Journal Sentinel newsroom. The item reached other teachers union locals and workers in other professions, including the state Department of Corrections. And it has become a flash point between Walker and union leaders, who already have a rocky relationship. Here’s the gist of the non-news. The fake story claims Walker has hired former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (not true). And that Jensen plans to use the state retirement system to help Walker balance the state budget (again, not true). It also includes this over-the-top (yet again, not true) statement: Jensen assured police and fire officials that their pensions are safe under Governor Walker but that public employees and teachers who never put their lives on the line nor contributed to the fund ought to be worried. "Those folks need to take a long hard look in the mirror and reflect on what they have taken away from the people of Wisconsin." The fake story goes on to "quote" Jensen comments from a (never occurred) appearance on Charlie Sykes’ radio talk show on WTMJ-AM (620). We don’t know for certain where the fake story came from, though there have been accusations, which we will explore below. We do know when it jumped to the Internet. How did the item get on the Little Chute Education Association site? Union president and Little Chute High School science teacher Chris Choudoir took the blame. He said the fake story came to him in an e-mail on Jan. 14, 2011. He posted it on the site, which was launched in November and aimed at the union’s 130 members. In less than an hour he learned he had been punked. "It’s not a legitimate article, so I removed it from the blog," Choudoir said. "My intention was not to propagate a false article." He sent an e-mail apologizing to his members for the posting. The item was on the site 50 minutes, he said. He added: "That’s the problem with things in type - you don’t pick up on the sarcasm." Choudoir said traffic for the site was high that day -- some 499 hits when he took the article down. Some of those hits came from Walker’s office, which said it received three phone calls and five or six e-mails about the matter. Walker’s office blames the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide teachers union, for spreading the false e-mail. Walker spokesman Cullen Werwie noted that some copies of it bear the name of an employee who appears to work for the union and sent it to "all," including district chapters of the union. In one response to a teacher who contacted Walker’s office, Werwie wrote: "Scott Jensen has no role in the Walker Administration and Governor Walker is not going to raid the pension fund." Werwie concluded: "It is unfortunate that instead of working to be part of the solution the union who represents you, which claims to have your best interests in mind, spends its time spreading lies and making up fake news stories." WEAC denied responsibility for the e-mail. "We can’t confirm where the e-mail came from," said spokeswoman Christina Brey. "We didn’t generate it." Brey said union leadership told its regional directors about the item and told them "no, this is not right. It’s a hoax." She added: "We’ve taken internal action to make sure that news articles are authenticated." Let’s take a deep breath. Someone -- it’s unclear who -- tried to give the "Weekend Update" fake news treatment to a topic that clearly has public employees concerned. Walker has promised that cuts will be made in public employee benefits and suggested the state could reduce union bargaining rights. It may have been a bit of satirical venting, but not everyone got the joke. PolitiFact’s national site has evaluated 90 chain e-mails, and found many of them to contain simply ridiculous claims. This fake news story joins the heap. Feel free to forward these words: Pants on Fire. | null | Chain email | null | null | null | 2011-01-21T09:00:00 | 2011-01-20 | ['Scott_Walker_(politician)'] |
goop-01059 | Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz Having Baby To Save Marriage? | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/daniel-craig-rachel-weisz-baby-marriage-problems/ | null | null | null | Andrew Shuster | null | Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz Having Baby To Save Marriage? | 11:47 am, May 3, 2018 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00256 | In 2013, It Was Not Sushma Vs Meira But Sushma Vs Sonia: A FactCheck | none | https://www.boomlive.in/in-2013-it-was-not-sushma-vs-meira-but-sushma-vs-sonia-a-factcheck/ | null | null | null | null | null | In 2013, It Was Not Sushma Vs Meira But Sushma Vs Sonia: A FactCheck | Jun 30 2017 5:46 pm, Last Updated: Jul 10 2017 3:40 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-14192 | Texas has 600,000 registered voters who don’t have the kind of photo ID needed to vote. | mostly true | /texas/statements/2016/apr/22/tom-smitty-smith/tom-smith-public-citizen-says-600000-texas-registe/ | Tom "Smitty" Smith, a liberal activist, says more than half a million Texans lack sufficient papers to legally turn out to vote. Smith, the longtime director of Public Citizen’s Texas office, made his claim in an April 14, 2016, commentary on campaign finance published in the Austin American-Statesman that also mentions the law under legal challenge requiring Texas voters to present a photo ID before being casting a ballot at a polling place. Republicans who carried the ID mandate into law in 2011 say it reduces chances of voter fraud. Democrats say the show-your-ID hoop was needless and obviously intended solely to reduce turnout by minorities, the elderly and other citizens likely not to have one of the accepted kinds of identification. And "Texas," Smith wrote, "has 600,000 registered voters who don’t have the kind of photo ID needed to vote." Under the Texas law, a registered voter may cast a ballot at the polls if she or he presents one of these kinds of identification: a Texas driver's license; a personal ID issued by the Department of Public Safety; an election certificate, which is a new form of state photo identification created by the law; a U.S. military ID card; a U.S. passport; or a Texas concealed handgun permit. So, do some 600,000 of the state’s 14.2 million registered voters lack all of those? By email, Smith told us he drew the figure from a Feb. 29, 2016, Washington Post news story stating that Texas may have the country’s toughest voter ID mandate and that a federal court in the state "found that 608,470 registered voters don’t have the voter IDs that the state now requires for voting. For example, residents can vote with their concealed-carry handgun licenses but not their state-issued student university IDs." We’ve rated a similar statement about voting with concealed handgun licenses True. Federal court ruling The story was referring to a decision by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi accepting the 600,000 estimate. Ramos’ October 2014 ruling, lately awaiting review by the full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, came in a suit brought by plaintiffs led by U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth. Specifically, Ramos’ ruling presents her finding that "approximately 608,470 registered voters in Texas, representing approximately 4.5% of all registered voters, lack qualified SB 14 ID," meaning one of the types of photo ID spelled out in Senate Bill 14, the legislation behind the Texas law. Expert's report In her ruling, Ramos said she based her finding on research presented by scholars, particularly Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor of government retained as a consultant in the lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department. Ansolabehere, Ramos wrote, "performed an extensive match of various databases to arrive at the figures set out above, which is referred to as the ‘No-Match List.’" Ramos elaborated: "First, he (Ansolabehere) determined which of the 13.5 million voters in Texas’s voter registration database, the Texas Election Administration Management System (TEAM), lacked SB 14 ID. He did this by comparing individual TEAM voter records with databases containing the records of those who possessed SB 14 ID—current DPS-issued Texas driver’s licenses, Texas personal ID cards, EICs, Texas concealed handgun licenses, United States passports, citizenship certificates, and military photo IDs—to arrive at a list of voter records that did not match with any SB 14 qualified photo ID. "Dr. Ansolabehere ‘scrubbed’ the list by removing entries that appeared to be duplicates and those appearing in other databases that identified persons who were deceased and who had relocated (potentially out of state). He also removed voters identified as inactive, and those who were eligible for SB 14’s disability exemption to further ensure that he was counting only those who had no alternative for voting other than with a qualified SB 14 ID. All of these matches were performed with algorithms designed to address different name spellings and the use of nicknames or other variations in the way individuals are identified or would be input into a database. He concluded that approximately 608,470 voters in the TEAM database lack qualified SB 14 ID." Ramos wrote that defenders of the photo ID mandate challenged Ansolabehere’s findings "by arguing that he failed to remove felons and voters who subsequently re-registered in another state. There was evidence that the (secretary of state’s office) purges the TEAM database on a daily basis for felons," Ramos wrote, "and Dr. Ansolabehere testified that recent data from both the Pew Research Center and various secretaries of state established that the number of voters who may have re-registered in another state is extremely small—less than one percent," the judge wrote. We asked Ansolabehere if the 608,000 figure he estimated might, nearly two years later, no longer reflect the likely number of registered voters lacking one of the permitted photo IDs. By email, he said he couldn’t offer any comment beyond his September 2014 expert’s report and court testimony since the legal challenge to the law hasn’t settled out. Similarly, we asked Smith if, perhaps, the number of registered voters lacking the required photo ID to go to the polls in Texas has changed since 2014, maybe decreasing with the law in place. By phone, Smith said he doesn’t know. A 2011 state estimate Our search of the Nexis news database reminded us the Texas secretary of state’s office in 2011 answered a federal request for information by saying research indicated that about 605,500 registered Texas voters might lack a state-issued license or ID; the figure was reached by comparing voter registrations to Department of Public Safety records by first name, last name and date of birth, per an October 2011 news story in the Dallas Morning News. In reviewing Smith’s claim, we wrote the agency requesting elaboration on its own estimate and to ask if it had an updated count. By email, spokeswoman Alicia Phillips Pierce said the office has no up-to-date estimate of Texas voters lacking a poll-acceptable ID. Pierce also said she couldn’t comment on Smith’s statement because of the continuing legal fight, though she suggested we consider state briefs filed in its appeal of Ramos’s ruling. By our read, a state’s brief filed in 2015 doesn’t challenge Ansolabehere’s total estimate of voters lacking a required ID outside of a footnote stating that since implementation of the ID law, about 22,000 "of the registered voters that plaintiffs claim do not have a photo ID have voted in at least one election." Our ruling Smith said: "Texas has 600,000 registered voters who don’t have the kind of photo ID needed to vote." That may have been so in 2014, according to an expert’s research, and the figure arguably aligns with a 2011 state estimate limited to matching voter registrations and driver licenses. We didn’t find an up-to-date figure, though, and Smith’s implication--that 600,000 citizens haven’t voted for lack of acceptable IDs--might not hold up; we don’t know. We rate the claim Mostly True. Mostly True – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/ab2c7daf-5de6-4a7a-8215-775d98c9a58a | null | Tom "Smitty" Smith | null | null | null | 2016-04-22T17:21:21 | 2016-04-14 | ['Texas'] |
snes-05477 | A photograph shows "the darkest baby in the world." | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-darkest-baby-world/ | null | Fauxtography | null | Dan Evon | null | FALSE: Is This The Darkest Baby In The World? | 17 December 2015 | null | ['None'] |
goop-02873 | Jennifer Aniston Writing Tell-All Book, | 0 | https://www.gossipcop.com/jennifer-aniston-tell-all-book-memoir/ | null | null | null | Shari Weiss | null | Jennifer Aniston NOT Writing Tell-All Book, Despite Report | 10:45 am, April 12, 2017 | null | ['None'] |
bove-00054 | Airtel ‘Bigotry’ Row: The Gaganjot Tweet To Pooja That Everyone Missed | none | https://www.boomlive.in/airtel-bigotry-row-the-gaganjot-tweet-to-pooja-that-everyone-missed/ | null | null | null | null | null | Airtel ‘Bigotry’ Row: The Gaganjot Tweet To Pooja That Everyone Missed | Jun 21 2018 8:03 pm, Last Updated: Jun 21 2018 8:05 pm | null | ['None'] |
pomt-08906 | Over the last 10 years, incomes for the top 1 percent "have grown." Meanwhile, the bottom half of the country, "they've seen their wages stagnate." | true | /truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/29/donna-brazile/brazile-claims-income-has-grown-top-1-percent-stag/ | During the July 25, 2010 roundtable of ABC's This Week, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile made the case for extending tax cuts for low and middle-income families, rather than for the wealthy. "Everyone is concerned about the deficit, and that's why we have to be careful how we frame this. I mean, you and I both know that -- Stephen, that over the last 10 years we've seen the top 1 percent, their incomes have grown. Meanwhile, the bottom half of the country, the bottom half of all income earners, they've seen their wages stagnate," she said. Income inequality has become a fairly common Democratic talking point, so we decided to weigh in on the claim that while income for the top 1 percent has been increasing, it's been largely stagnant for the bottom half of the country. Brazile's office told us to check out a June 2010 report by Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher for the left-learning Center on Budget and and Policy Priorities. Sherman uses data from the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number cruncher for Congress, to graph income for different groups over time. The data starts in 1979 and goes through 2007. "After-tax incomes nearly quadrupled for the top 1 percent of Americans in the last three decades, while barely rising among middle- and lower-income households," Sherman writes. We tracked down the raw CBO figures to see if our own calculations would match Sherman's. The numbers, which come from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), show average, inflation-adjusted to 2007, after-tax income. The chart shows how income has changed over time for five different income categories set by the IRS. There is additional data on the top 1 percent. No matter how you slice it, Brazile is on firm ground. Those with incomes in the bottom 20 percent had mean income of $16,100 in 1997. In 2007, it climbed to $17,700 -- or up 9.9 percent. For the group on the next rung up the ladder, income grew by 15.9 percent. For those ranked between 41 and 60 percent of income --only some of whom are in the bottom 50 percent -- income grew from $48,000 in 1997 to $55,300, or about 15.2 percent. That’s not stagnant, but it’s small potatoes compared to a 74.6 percent jump in income for the top 1 percent of earners. Mean income for that group climbed from $755,700 to slightly more than $1.3 million between 1997 and 2007. We then moved to income data from the U.S. Census. Those inflation-adjusted figures start in 1967 and go through 2008. Looking at the 10 years, 1998 to 2008, mean reported income for those at the bottom fell by 4.2 percent; for the next lowest income group it dropped by 3.9 percent, and for the group that includes some in the lowest half of incomes and some who are not, income decreased by 2.5 percent. During the same period, income for the top 5 percent (the figures do not include information on the top 1 percent), increased by about 0.5 percent. We should note, however, that if we look at income for the top 5 percent between 1998 and 2007 (as opposed to 2008 when the economy began spiraling downward), that's a 1.7 percent increase. Finally, we contacted numerous independent economic experts, who, for the most part, said that Brazile's argument is accurate. "The big picture statement is exactly right. No gains for bottom half, big gains for top 1 percent," wrote Irwin Garfinkel, professor of contemporary urban problems from Columbia University. Edward Wolff, economics professor at New York University, told us that, based on his calculations from the the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, "income of the bottom half fell by 9 percent over the last 10 years [from 1998-2008] while the income of the top one percent rose by 40 percent." A few experts did take issue with Brazile's use of the phrase "the last 10 years." As we pointed out, the most recent data for the CBO ends in 2007. Census figures only go through 2008. If Brazile was truly talking about the last 10 years, i.e. from 2000 to 2010, as opposed to the last 10 years for which the data is available, one may argue that she engaged in a little bit of extrapolation. Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, told us that "more and more of the compensation of the top 1 percent depends on the stock market," which took a plunge during the ongoing recession. Still, Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, argues in a July 2010 paper that the "Great Recession is unlikely to have a very large impact on top income shares and will certainly not undo much of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s". Sherman also pointed out that by "convention, it is often accepted to talk about the last 10 years as meaning the last 10 years for which the data exist." We also note that Brazile mentioned "wages" in the last part of her statement, which is a narrower term than income. Still, based on our review of the context of the conversation, our discussion with experts, and the statement itself --which mentions income twice, it seems clear that she was talking about income in both cases. Donna Brazile said that while the incomes for the top 1 percent have climbed, they've been largely stagnant for the bottom half of the country. We consulted data from the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Census, and just to be sure, we double checked with independent economics experts. The CBO numbers showed relatively small increases in income for those in the bottom half, compared with the 74.6 percent gain for the top 1 percent. Mean income for the top 1 percent rose from $755,700 in 1997 to slightly more than $1.3 million 10 years later. The most recent 10-year data -- from Census -- shows income falling for those in the bottom 50 percent and increasing for the top 5 percent. Most of the experts we talked to said Brazile’s underlying argument is on solid ground. As a result, we rate this True. | null | Donna Brazile | null | null | null | 2010-07-29T11:48:49 | 2010-07-25 | ['None'] |
tron-03003 | Juanita Broaddrick Bill Clinton Rape Accusations | unproven! | https://www.truthorfiction.com/juanita-broaddrick-bill-clinton-rape-accusations/ | null | politics | null | null | ['2016 election', 'donald trump', 'hillary clinton', 'the clintons'] | Juanita Broaddrick Bill Clinton Rape Accusations | Oct 11, 2016 | null | ['None'] |
snes-02410 | A recently removed statue of Jefferson Davis is being replaced with a large bronze tribute to Barack Obama. | false | https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/jefferson-davis-statue-barack-obama/ | null | Junk News | null | Kim LaCapria | null | Is a Jefferson Davis Statue to be Replaced with Obama Likeness? | 18 May 2017 | null | ['Jefferson_Davis', 'Barack_Obama'] |
tron-00197 | Various Rumors about the Terrorist Attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon | none | https://www.truthorfiction.com/boston-marathon-bombing/ | null | 9-11-attack | null | null | null | Various Rumors about the Terrorist Attack at the 2013 Boston Marathon | Mar 17, 2015 | null | ['None'] |
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