Bill Clinton overstated the effect of the crime bill he signed in 1994 when he said, “because of that bill we had a 25-year low in crime, a 33-year low in the murder rate.” Independent analyses found it had a modest effect on crime rates.
Trump retweeted a bogus graphic purporting to show the percentage of whites killed by blacks and other homicide data delineated by race. Almost every figure in the graphic is wrong.
President Barack Obama says “states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths.” Carly Fiorina says those states have “the highest gun crime rates.” But both imply a causation that’s impossible to prove.
Sen. Rand Paul used a recent speech to Maryland Republicans partly to address injustices in the legal system. But he botched one statistic and slightly exaggerated another one.
The Republican presidential primary has three new contenders: former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Every now and then we see a powerful attack ad that is factually accurate, but makes such a strong appeal to fear that we urge viewers to pause to consider all the facts. That’s the case in Nebraska.
A controversial TV ad from Sen. Mark Begich accuses his opponent, former Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan, of letting “a lot of sex offenders get off with light sentences” — specifically one ex-con who prosecutors say killed an elderly couple and raped their infant granddaughter in 2013.
A TV ad from Republican New York City mayoral candidate Joe Lhota distorts Bill de Blasio’s words amid violent imagery intending to portray the Democrat as soft on crime.