Articles

Obama’s Work Claim

Summary Obama’s latest ad repeats an often-stated claim, saying he "worked his way through college and Harvard Law.” We know Obama took out loans to get himself through school. But the campaign at first provided information on just two jobs Obama had in those years, and they were both in …
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Distorting Obama

Summary McCain released a Web ad that distorts Obama’s positions on clean-energy innovation and nuclear power. The ad portrays Obama as saying "no" to energy "innovation" and to "the electric car." In fact, Obama proposed a $150 billion program of research into a wide variety of clean-energy technologies last year, …
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Obama Polishes His Resume

Summary Obama has released his first post-primary ad, a 60-second spot that’s airing in 18 battleground states. In effect, "Country I Love" is Obama’s first ad of the general election campaign, and as such it invites scrutiny. (FactCheck will address McCain’s first general election ads in a separate article.) We …
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McCain’s Power Outage

Summary McCain has spent the week focusing on energy policy, making some surprising, and inaccurate, statements. Among them: He said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis." But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn’t …
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Obama’s Lame Claim About McCain’s Money

Summary Obama announced he would become the first presidential candidate since 1972 to rely totally on private donations for his general election campaign, opting out of the system of public financing and spending limits that was put in place after the Watergate scandal. One reason, he said, is that "John …
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Obama’s Inflated Health “Savings”

Summary Obama says his health care plan will garner large savings – $120 billion a year, or $2,500 per family – with more than half coming from the use of electronic health records. And he says he’ll make that happen in his first term. We find his statements to be …
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Soft on Iran

Summary John McCain is attacking Barack Obama’s opposition to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which (among other things) called for labeling Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. McCain claims that Obama’s opposition means that he also opposed calling the IRGC terrorists. We find otherwise.  Obama cosponsored an earlier bill …
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Katrina Kerfuffle

Summary McCain was asked by a New Orleans reporter why he voted twice against an independent commission to investigate the government’s failings before and after Hurricane Katrina, and he incorrectly stated that he had "voted for every investigation."   McCain actually voted twice, in 2005 and 2006, to defeat a …
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Clinton Spins Her Donors

The debt-strapped Clinton campaign is appealing for money with an e-mail telling potential donors that polls “consistently” show she would beat McCain in November, and that she’s leading Obama in the popular vote. We find both claims are misleading. A number of recent polls actually show Clinton tied with McCain, or even trailing. For most of 2008, polls have shown McCain ahead.
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Nonsense in New Mexico

Rep. Steve Pearce’s campaign and an independent anti-abortion group both have attacked Rep. Heather Wilson in the hotly contested race to be the Republican nominee for an open New Mexico Senate seat. But Pearce and the group run afoul of the facts. A mailer from Pearce claims that Wilson “voted for cloning that would create human embryos specifically to be destroyed for scientific research.” Actually, she voted to make it illegal to clone humans for reproductive purposes; the bill did not address embryos to be used for research, as anti-abortion groups wanted. It’s simply false to say she voted for som
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