Q: Why are there only two major parties in the U.S.?
A: The winner-take-all system in the U.S. favors two stable parties.
Stories by Joe Miller
One-Two Punch for GOP
Summary
In the final debate before New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary election, five Republican candidates appeared on Fox News. We found no shortage of recycled bunk, and a new twist or two:
Huckabee repeated his claim to have made 94 tax cuts including the "first broad-based tax cut" in the history of Arkansas, though he actually signed tax bills that resulted in a net increase in taxes of $500 million.
Romney said his increases in "fees"
Holocaust Curriculum Suspended in UK?
Q: Did the U.K. suspend its Holocaust curriculum because it offended Muslim students?
A: No, neither the United Kingdom nor the University of Kentucky has suspended teaching the Holocaust.
Not Working 4 Edwards
A labor group’s ad supporting Edwards misleads about plant closings.
Defining Enemy Combatant
Q: What is an enemy combatant?
A: “Enemy combatant” is shorthand for people who are fighting unlawfully. But no one is quite sure exactly what that means.
Romney on Huckabee
His ad strains to create black-and-white contrasts from blurry shades of gray.
Not Pelosi’s Windfall Tax
Q: Did Pelosi advocate taxing “windfall” stock profits at 100%?
A: No. A widely circulated e-mail quoting her is a fraud.
Cognitive Science and FactCheck.org, or Why We (Still) Do What We Do
Have you heard about how Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet? What about how Iraq was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center? Or maybe the one about how George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any U.S. president ever? Chances are pretty good that you might even believe one (or more) of these claims. And yet all three are false. At FactCheck.org our stock in trade is debunking these sorts of false or misleading political claims,
More Mitt Missteps
Mitt Romney has been boasting of accomplishments as governor, while also outlining foreign policy proposals. But Romney sometimes alters the past, exaggerates his record and traffics in ambiguous language.
Unspinning the FairTax
Summary
In our recent article on the second GOP debate, we called out Gov. Mike Huckabee as well as Reps. Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter for their support of the FairTax. We wrote that the bipartisan Advisory Panel on Tax Reform had “calculated that a sales tax would have to be set at 34 percent of retail sales prices to bring in the same revenue as the taxes it would replace, meaning that an automobile with a retail price of $10,000 would cost $13,400 including the new sales tax.”