The FactCheck Wire

Obama’s Speech and Those Frivolous Earmarks

President Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, and we caught several factual errors and misstatements in his remarks. See our full story on FactCheck.org for all the details. Here’s just one item we found: Obama exaggerated a bit in describing the Children’s Health Insurance Program that …
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The $79 Billion Iraqi Surplus, Re-reconsidered

During the 2008 campaign, we repeatedly called out then-candidate Barack Obama for complaining that the U.S. was spending billions in Iraq while the Iraqi government sat on a projected $79 billion surplus. We said that Obama’s projection didn’t account for updates to the Iraqi budget. But things were slightly more …
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Obama’s Inaugural Bobble

President Barack Obama made one factual error in his first speech in office when he said, immediately after being sworn in: Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. It is true that Obama is counted as the 44th president, but he’s only the 43rd person to take the oath. …
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Wrong Numbers on a Tin Roof

During his last press conference with White House reporters yesterday, President Bush defended his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying, “don’t tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed.” He even repeated the statistic three times. The performance …
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We Wondered Where They Went…

Someone whose work we criticized a fair bit in 2004 and 2006 explains why, perhaps, so little was heard from MoveOn.org and other groups in 2008 in this piece fromNational Public Radio. Money was scarce, but other factors — such as the presence of factcheckers — may have had an …
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You Ask, We Answer

That’s the idea behind our Ask FactCheck feature on themain site. This week, we looked into a suspicious quote allegedly from President-elect Barack Obama, speaking about urgent gun policy changes. The reader who sent it to us wasn’t convinced it was legitimate, and our reporting showed it was almost certainly …
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Georgia Ad Attacks

In recent weeks, we’ve posted two articles on our main site on the misleading ad war being waged on Georgia airwaves. The Senate run-off election is set for tomorrow (Dec. 2) to determine whether Republican Saxby Chambliss holds onto his seat or challenger Jim Martin, a former state representative, adds …
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It’s Official: Obama “Born in the U.S.A.”

Of all the nutty rumors, baseless conspiracy theories and sheer disinformation that we’ve dealt with at FactCheck.org during campaign 2008, perhaps the goofiest is the claim that Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen” and therefore not eligible to be president under the constitution. This claim was first advanced by …
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Making Ends Meet

Sen. Barack Obama has said several times that he has proposed cuts that pay for “every dime” of his spending proposals, a claim we’ve called “misleading.” The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s analysis, for one, found that “without substantial cuts in government spending” Obama’s plan – and McCain’s, too – “would …
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The Whoppers of 2008 – The Sequel

We’ve chronicled a lot of misleading, exaggerated and flat-out false claims during this campaign — too many to count. But some rise above the others in their sheer mendaciousness. In our latest article on FactCheck.org, we present a look at the biggest bogus bits of the final five weeks of …
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