The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, containing about 650 miles of bookshelves.
Source: Library of Congress
Year: 2009
May 2, 2009
The Asian population in the U.S. grew by 2.9 percent between 2006 and 2007, when it totaled 15.2 million residents.
Source: Census Bureau
Fantasy Jobs?
At President Obama’s April 29 news conference, he claimed that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has "already saved or created over 150,000 jobs." Wait a minute. Isn’t the number of jobs actually plummeting?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy lost more than 1.3 million jobs in the two months after he took office, and it has probably lost at least another half-million in April. The day after Obama spoke, the Department of Labor announced that another 631,000 workers (seasonally adjusted) had filed new claims for unemployment insurance the previous week.
May 1, 2009
May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. It began as a commemoration of the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to the U.S. in May 1843 and the work done by Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad.
Source: Census Bureau
Warned About bin Laden?
Q: Did Oliver North warn Al Gore about Osama bin Laden at Senate hearings in 1987?
A: This ridiculous hoax has been circulating since 2001, even though the secretary of the U.S. Senate and North himself have debunked it.
April 30, 2009
The Spanish Flu of 1918 is the most deadly in recent history. Twenty to 40 million people worldwide died from the disease.
Source: National Institutes of Health
Helen Was Right … and So Was Gibbs
When we posted a FactCheck Wire item last week about a dispute between White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and longtime correspondent Helen Thomas, we were surprised that Gibbs didn’t know President Obama had taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago’s law school. That’s a fact that had come up many times during the campaign, after all, including during a kerfuffle about whether Obama had the right to call himself a "professor."
Well, sometimes you have to walk a story back so far it falls off a cliff.
Obama on FOCA, 2.0
Is Obama shying away from the Freedom of Choice Act?
When CNN correspondent Ed Henry asked the president about his current thinking on FOCA at last night’s White House press conference, Obama used very different language than he did during the campaign.
In 2008, as we noted in our Ask FactCheck item on FOCA, Obama told a Planned Parenthood audience: "The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Now that’s the first thing I’d do."
Government-Run Health Care?
A group called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights began airing a television ad this week that criticizes government-run health care and falsely suggests Congress wants a British-style system here in the U.S. The ad neglects to mention that President Obama hasn’t proposed a government-run plan and, in fact …
100 Days of Spin
After 100 days in office, we find President Obama is sticking to the facts – mostly. Nevertheless, we find that the president has occasionally made claims that put him and his policies in a better light than the facts warrant. He has claimed that private economists agreed with the forecast in …