Tag Archives: Iraq

Cost of Illegal Immigrants

Posted on April 6, 2009

Q: Do illegal immigrants cost $338.3 billion dollars a year? More than the Iraq war? A: A chain e-mail that makes this claim is loaded with errors and misleading assertions. Published studies vary widely but put the cost to government at a small fraction of that total.

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The $79 Billion Iraqi Surplus, Re-reconsidered

Posted on January 29, 2009

During the 2008 campaign, we repeatedly called out then-candidate Barack Obama for complaining that the U.S. was spending billions in Iraq while the Iraqi government sat on a projected $79 billion surplus. We said that Obama’s projection didn’t account for updates to the Iraqi budget. But things were slightly more …
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The $79 Billion Iraqi Surplus, Reconsidered

Posted on October 13, 2008

We’ve criticized both Barack Obama and Joe Biden several times now for claiming that the U.S. is spending $10 billion a month to Iraq while that nation is sitting on a $79 billion surplus. We wrote that the $79 billion figure was out of date because Iraq had since passed a …
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Vets for Freedom Exercise Freedom to Mislead

Posted on October 6, 2008

The right-leaning Vets for Freedom, in an effort to drum up support for a resolution heralding “the strategic success of the troop surge in Iraq,” released this ad Oct. 1 in California. The ad, which criticizes Sen. Barack Obama, represents a $2.2 million buy – the largest statewide airtime purchase …
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FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate

Posted on October 3, 2008 , Updated on Oct. 13, 2008 , Corrected on Oct. 3, 2008

Summary Biden and Palin debated, and both mangled some facts. Palin mistakenly claimed that troop levels in Iraq had returned to “pre-surge” levels. Levels are gradually coming down but current plans would have levels higher than pre-surge numbers through early next year, at least. Palin repeated a false claim that …
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The Iraqi Surplus

Posted on October 2, 2008

Biden said that Iraq had an “$80 billion surplus.” Obama said the same — $79 billion — in the last debate, and we called him on it then. Seventy-nine billion is an out-of-date projection. The Iraqis currently have $29 billion in the bank, and could have $47 billion to $59 …
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Troop Levels Off

Posted on October 2, 2008

Palin got her numbers wrong on troop levels when she said that troops were now down to “pre-surge” levels. The surge was announced in January 2007, at which point there were 132,000 troops in Iraq according to the Brookings Institute Iraq Index. As of September 2008, that number was 146,000. …
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FactChecking Debate No. 1

Posted on September 27, 2008 , Updated on October 13, 2008

Summary McCain and Obama contradicted each other repeatedly during their first debate, and each volunteered some factual misstatements as well. Here’s how we sort them out: Obama said McCain adviser Henry Kissinger backs talks with Iran “without preconditions,” but McCain disputed that. In fact, Kissinger did recently call for “high …
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Obama’s Iraqi Accounting Oversight

Posted on September 9, 2008

Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly conducted a sit-down interview with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that is airing in four installments. (Parts three and four of the interview will air tonight and tomorrow night.) The first segment was broadcast Thursday, and we noticed an accounting error on Obama’s part. When …
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Uranium in Iraq

Posted on August 3, 2008

Q: Was it recently revealed that the U.S. found uranium in Iraq after the invasion in 2003? A: No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first …
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