Monthly Archive: October 2012
Bryan W. White
October 27, 2012
President Obama: “Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been…
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Bryan W. White
October 24, 2012
Mitt Romney: “And then the president began what I have called an apology tour, of going to various nations in the Middle East and criticizing America.” President Obama: “Nothing Governor Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me apologizing. This has been probably the biggest whopper that’s been told during the course of this campaign. And every…
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Bryan W. White
October 20, 2012
We have an example from yesterday of a fact checker doing something a fact checker should not do. PolitiFact, the popular fact checking site associated with the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, cherry-picked a definition and ruled on a politician’s statement based on that cherry picking. PolitiFact’s mistake occurs as it checks a claim from Republican senate candidate Linda McMahon. McMahon’s…
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Bryan W. White
October 18, 2012
Earlier today I read a fine fact check by Glenn Kessler of President Obama’s claims about Libya from the second presidential debate. And a few minutes ago I read the PolitiFact version. PolitiFact: Some have parsed Obama’s remarks and argued he didn’t say the Benghazi attack was specifically an act of terror. However, given the overall context of his…
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Bryan W. White
October 17, 2012
President Obama: “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror.” Overview President Obama used an ambiguous phrase that was more or less technically correct to misleadingly answer Gov. Romney’s…
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Bryan W. White
October 16, 2012
None other than Matthew Yglesias published on Monday with a piece that jibes with part of the fact check of Vice President Joe Biden that we published on Sunday. Yglesias: So on one level, Biden’s point here is that Republicans are huge hypocrites on the subject of debt. Absolutely true. But what’s this about wars on the credit card?…
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Bryan W. White
October 15, 2012
Our fact check of Paul Ryan’s charge that the Obama administration called Syrian ruler Bashar Assad a “reformer” nearly carried a bonus critique of PolitiFact’s reporting of the context. The problem? The mainstream press appears to downplay the force of the Syrian crackdown prior to Clinton’s infamous statement on “Meet the Press.” The Tennessean provides perhaps the best example so…
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Bryan W. White
October 15, 2012
Paul Ryan: “We should not have called Bashar Assad a reformer when he was turning his Russian-provided guns on his own people.” Overview During his debate with Vice President Biden, Republican candidate for vice president Paul Ryan claimed the Obama administration referred to Syrian leader Bashar Assad as a reformer. Though PolitiFact rated the claim “Mostly False,” we’ll find…
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Bryan W. White
October 14, 2012
References for this site represent a modified MLA style. Wherever possible we will use references available on the Web. MLA Style requires no listing of a URL under ordinary circumstances, which works fine because we’re providing hyperlinks through the title of the reference. We omit the indentations beyond the first line of the reference because the WordPress interface makes achieving…
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Bryan W. White
October 14, 2012
Vice President Joe Biden: “They talk about this Great Recession if it fell out of the sky, like, ‘Oh, my goodness, where did it come from?’ It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for the…
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