Barack Obama Archives - Page 56 of 81

O RLY?

July 29, 2009

Yesterday, we wearily acknowledged that nothing would dissuade birth-certificate doubters from their conviction that Barack Obama is not a United States natural-born citizen. As if on cue, dentist/lawyer Orly Taitz appeared on the "Colbert Report," and told the faux pundit that nothing short of retroactive zombie naturalization would convince her that Obama was qualified to be prez.

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The money quote:

Colbert: What would he have to do to satisfy you and those in your movement?

False Euthanasia Claims

July 29, 2009

On former Sen. Fred Thompson’s radio show, former lieutenant governor of New York Betsy McCaughey said that the House’s proposed health care bill contained a provision that would institute mandatory counseling sessions telling seniors how “to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.” House Minority Leader John Boehner made a slightly more measured …

The Last Word? We Wish.

July 28, 2009

We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our “Born in the U.S.A.” article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up.

Obama’s Health Care News Conference

July 23, 2009

President Obama tried to sell his health care overhaul in prime time, mangling some facts in the process. He also strained to make the job sound easier to pay for than experts predict. Obama promised once again that a health care overhaul “will be paid for.” But congressional budget experts say …

England’s and Canada’s Health Care

July 9, 2009

Q: Is it true that persons older than 59 can’t get heart surgery in England?
A: There’s no such prohibition on heart operations in England, as a chain e-mail claims.

Same Inaccurate Claim on Oil Imports

July 7, 2009

In a July 6 interview with Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, President Obama repeated his false claim that the U.S. “import[s] more oil today than ever before.” When Obama first said this in February during an address to a joint-session of Congress, we wrote that the president had gotten his facts wrong. We said then that oil imports peaked in 2005 and have “substantially” declined since.

That’s still the case. This chart from the U.S. Energy Information Administration,

More Unemployment Blues

July 2, 2009

If you’re the glass-half-full type, you might think it’s good news that the nation’s unemployment rate was largely unchanged from May to June. It crept up just 0.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. But that also means that the original projections from President Obama’s economic advisers on what would happen with and without the stimulus plan are still off — and significantly so.
In mid-June, we wrote about the large discrepancy between the jobs that actually have been lost and what administration economists had predicted in January.

The Long-Term View

July 1, 2009

As part of his ongoing health-care-overhaul tour, President Barack Obama held a town hall event July 1 in Annandale, Va. Among the president’s messages: Medicare and Medicaid spending are getting out of control. And he’s right.
Obama said: “And for those who rightly worry about deficits, the amount our government spends on Medicare and Medicaid will eventually grow larger than what our government spends today on everything else combined,” adding that a recent Congressional Budget Office study showed that “when you look at the rising costs of entitlement,

Veteran Visit

July 1, 2009

Q: Was Obama rude to wounded veterans during a visit to the National Naval Medical Center?
A: A chain e-mail that makes such a claim gets several facts wrong and is disputed by an official who was present at the meeting.

Campaigning on Single Payer?

June 29, 2009

On “Meet the Press” on June 28, former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney falsely claimed that President Obama had called for a “single-payer” health care system on the campaign trail:

Romney: President Obama, when he was campaigning, said he wanted a single-payer system.

We debunked this falsehood when Sen. John McCain said it during the third presidential debate. McCain claimed that “as he said, his object is a single payer system.” But as a presidential candidate,