FactCheck.org Author: Lori Robertson

College Kills Faith?

February 27, 2012

Rick Santorum is off base when he criticizes college as a place where young people lose their “faith commitment.” In fact, the percentage of those with weakened religious affiliations is higher for those who don’t go to college.
Santorum also twists Obama’s words when he accuses him of snobbery for pushing a college education. In fact, the president also urged vocational training.
On Feb. 26, ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked Santorum why he called President Obama “a snob”

PAC Strains ‘Abortion’ Facts

February 24, 2012

An anti-abortion group is making the shocking claim that Mitt Romney “enforced a law which required Catholic hospitals to provide abortions.” To call this a stretch is putting it mildly. What Romney enforced — after first vetoing the legislation — was a requirement that hospitals provide rape victims with the morning-after pill, a drug that is designed to stop pregnancy from occurring if taken within a few days of unprotected intercourse. He didn’t tell Catholic hospitals that they had to perform abortions.

GOP’s ‘Job-Killing’ Whopper, Again

February 21, 2012

The exaggerated Republican claim that the new health care law “kills jobs” was high on our list of the “Whoppers of 2011.” But the facts haven’t stopped Republicans and their allies from making the “job-killing” claim a major theme of their campaign 2012 TV ads: Five ads by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce …

Gingrich Spanish Radio Ad Pulled

January 26, 2012

Before we got a chance to write about it, Newt Gingrich yanked a Spanish-language radio ad off the airwaves in Florida. The reason: No, it wasn’t a stellar fact-checking by journalists. Rather, it was Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s complaint that the ad’s criticism of Mitt Romney was “inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn’t belong in this campaign.”
Gingrich’s ad had called Romney “the most anti-immigrant candidate,” a claim to which Rubio strenuously objected. He told the Miami Herald: “The truth is that neither of these two men is anti-immigrant.

Refereeing the Republican Response

January 25, 2012

We concentrated our fact-checking efforts on the main attraction last night — the president’s State of the Union address — but we also found factual fouls in the Republican response from Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels.
Daniels took a swipe at President Obama for dictating which light bulbs Americans should use — but it was President George W. Bush who signed the legislation in question into law. And he used a misleading statistic in talking about the country’s unemployment situation.

Santorum Wrong on Marriage

January 17, 2012

Rick Santorum claimed that the Obama administration told an abstinence education group that it could “no longer promote marriage” to at-risk youth “as a way of avoiding poverty.” That’s not true, according to the group Santorum mentioned.
At the Republican presidential debate on Jan. 16, Santorum said that Best Friends — an organization that promotes “character education” for girls in schools and promotes abstinence from premarital sex, as well as drugs and alcohol — had been told by the Obama administration that the group could no longer “promote marriage”

Gingrich Makes a French Connection

January 13, 2012

Newt Gingrich attacks Mitt Romney once again, this time in a Web video that bashes Romney for raising taxes, giving money to Democrats (back in 1992) and — sacre bleu! — speaking French. But a few of the claims, besides the French one, could use some context.
The one-minute video says that Romney “donated to Democrats.” That’s true, but voters might want to know that he gave a total of $1,500 to three congressional candidates 20 years ago,

Gingrich’s ‘Baloney’-filled Attacks on Romney

January 11, 2012

Newt Gingrich is out with two new attacks on Mitt Romney: an ad airing in South Carolina that tries to brand Romney as a “pro-abortion” governor, and a nearly three-minute Web video that gauges Romney statements on a “Baloney-O-Meter.” We found a bit of baloney in both …

Romney’s Shaky Job Claims

January 5, 2012

Mitt Romney has taken to saying that he created more than 100,000 net jobs through his work in the private sector, and more jobs as governor than President Obama has created since taking office. But the first claim is unproven, and the second is misleading.
It’s true that the private equity firm Bain Capital, which Romney headed from 1984 to 1999, invested in many companies that went on to add jobs. But there’s no thorough count of the jobs gained and lost in all the companies in which Bain invested.

Neurological ‘Death Panels’?

January 5, 2012

Q: Does Obama plan to deny emergency brain surgery for patients over 70?
A: No. A man claiming on a radio talk show to be a brain surgeon lied about that, and about a meeting of two associations of neurological surgeons, those associations say.