We continue to receive queries about claims and theories advanced by "birthers," who wish to believe that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the USA or that he somehow gave up his citizenship and thus is not qualified to hold the office he occupies. One is a claim, first advanced last year, that his trip to Pakistan in 1981 proves he must not have been a U.S. citizen because Americans were not permitted to travel there at the time.
Stories by Brooks Jackson
Director Emeritus, FactCheck.org
Georgia Arms
Q: Did the Obama administration shut down a Georgia ammunition supplier? Is it trying to create an ammo shortage?
A: Georgia Arms still is doing a booming business in reloaded military cartridges. The Pentagon quickly reversed a move to stop selling spent casings.
Obama: U.S. “One of the Largest Muslim Countries.” Not!
President Barack Obama claimed that the U.S. is "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world" in terms of population. That strains the facts mightily. The U.S. Muslim population probably doesn’t even rank in the top 50.
Obama’s remark came in a June 1 interview with French TV correspondent Laura Haim:
Obama: June 1: Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam.
Sotomayer First ‘Hispanic?’
Q: Would Sonia Sotomayor really be the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court?
A: Depending on your point of view, the late Benjamin Cardozo might be considered “Hispanic.”
‘Godless Dollars’
Q: Did the government issue new dollar coins without the words "In God We Trust"?
A: Congress ordered the words to be stamped on the edges of the coins, but an unknown number of "Godless dollars" were produced by mistake.
Burned Bibles?
Q: Did the Obama administration burn soldiers’ Bibles?
A: The military destroyed Bibles printed in Afghan languages to prevent distribution to local Muslims. But it happened during the Bush administration.
Drop in the Bucket? See for Yourself.
In our "What’s in a Number" post on May 7, we noted a clever video by Salt Lake City software developer Matt Shapiro, showing how little $100 million in savings would amount to when compared with the $3.6 trillion in federal spending being proposed by President Obama (about one-quarter of a penny on the scale of the budget being equal to $100.)
Now Matt has come up with a second video to help us wrap our brains around the latest figures.
Misquoting Yamamoto
Advocates of gun rights often argue that in World War II Japan was deterred from invading the U.S. mainland by a fear of American citizens with guns in their closets. They frequently quote Japan’s Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as saying: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
But this quote is unsubstantiated and almost certainly bogus, even though it has been repeated thousands of times in various Internet postings.
Was Obama Born in the USA?
Q: Has a “smoking gun” been found to prove Obama was not born a U.S. citizen? Did he attend Occidental College on a scholarship for foreign students?
A: This chain e-mail is a transparent April Fools’ Day hoax. It fabricates an AP news story about an nonexistent group, and makes false claims about Obama and the Fulbright program.
Did Obama Misquote Churchill?
In the New York Times‘ "Caucus" blog today, Kate Phillips offers a well-documented and thorough analysis of a lingering controversy: Did Winston Churchill really say about torture what President Obama says he did?
There has been considerable back-and-forth elsewhere regarding this passage in the president’s "100 days" news conference:
Obama, April 29: I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day, talking about the fact that the British during World War II,