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FactChecking the Ninth GOP Debate
factcheck.org ^ | 2-14-2016

Posted on 02/14/2016 7:00:29 AM PST by Citizen Zed

Republican candidates misrepresent the facts on the Supreme Court, immigration, abortion and other issues.

They repeated several false and misleading claims, and made some new ones, too.

Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that "we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year." That's wrong. Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year.

Businessman Donald Trump called Cruz the "single biggest liar" for saying Trump "supports federal taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood." But Trump did leave open the possibility of funding some aspects before later saying he wouldn't support funding as long as the group performed abortions.

Sen. Marco Rubio said that illegal immigration "is worse today than it was three years ago, which is worse than it was five years ago." The estimated number of immigrants in the country illegally has remained stable over that time.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson attributed a quote to Joseph Stalin that experts say didn't come from the Soviet dictator.

Trump falsely claimed that a failed eminent domain case to benefit a Trump casino project in 1998 "wasn't for a parking lot." It was.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush conflated two Trump quotes in claiming Trump called Sen. John McCain a "loser because he was a P.O.W." Trump said he was a loser, because he lost the 2008 presidential election.

Trump claimed that the nation's economy "didn't grow" in the last quarter. It did grow, by a small amount.

Trump repeated his claim that he is a self-funded candidate. Not entirely. His money makes up 66 percent of his campaign's money through the end of 2015. The rest comes from individual donors.

And there were several other repeated claims we've fact-checked before on jobs, taxes, immigration and regulation.

(Excerpt) Read more at factcheck.org ...


TOPICS: Chit/Chat
KEYWORDS: 2016debates; assclonwposer; factcheckliars; garbagepost; sc2016
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So it seems Trump is the biggest liar.
1 posted on 02/14/2016 7:00:29 AM PST by Citizen Zed
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To: Citizen Zed

My Super Tuesday primary election is about 2 weeks away. I don’t give a crap about “fact checks”. The die is cast, the race has been run, the votes are already decided.

Factcheck.org my butt. Go look at the ‘unbiased staff’ of that place.


2 posted on 02/14/2016 7:04:36 AM PST by Gaffer
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To: Citizen Zed

Cruz corrected himself on the Supreme Court nominee. Correct is no one has been nominated and confirmed in an election year.


3 posted on 02/14/2016 7:05:42 AM PST by pnut22
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To: Citizen Zed
Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that "we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year." That's wrong. Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year.

Kennedy was nominated for the bench in 1987. Factcheck should get their facts right.

4 posted on 02/14/2016 7:06:08 AM PST by Hoodat (Article 4, Section 4)
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To: Citizen Zed

Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that “we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year.” That’s wrong. Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year.

So PISSED OFF that this was not attacked. Cruz lies more then the worst teenager. It is so natural for him. I have never seen anything like that before.


5 posted on 02/14/2016 7:06:20 AM PST by napscoordinator
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To: Citizen Zed

Nothing form any of the candidates is worth noting. Minor mistakes or easily explained statements.

To rush this garbage to FR just so you can say “Trump is the biggest liar” is just pathetic trolling.


6 posted on 02/14/2016 7:07:49 AM PST by VanDeKoik
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To: Citizen Zed

They get a few facts wrong - as opposed to democrats that lie about darn near everything.


7 posted on 02/14/2016 7:09:40 AM PST by smokingfrog ( sleep with one eye open (<o> ---)
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To: Citizen Zed

Oh please. If you think .02 percent is growth then you are dumber then I imagined. If you think that Trump isn’t self paying for his campaign minus American people VOLUNTEERING to give a few pennies, you are crazy.

So those are the worst you’ve got, you will lose as typical.


8 posted on 02/14/2016 7:09:47 AM PST by napscoordinator
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To: Citizen Zed; All

PolitiFact Is Guilty of Fact Abuse

You’ve got to give the leftist reporters in our mainstream media credit. They never tire of trying to reassure the public that their biased stories are without bias. The latest, and arguably most effective, innovation lets the MSM set the terms of acceptable debate by defining what is true and what is false in political discussions.
 
This is accomplished through the use of “fact checkers” that are marketed to the public as totally unbiased, scientific data crunchers that are only interested in truth, justice, and The American Way. The reality is these “fact checkers” have their thumb on the scale of truth and actively tilt the discussion toward the left by disparaging conservative issues and elected officials.
 
 
PolitiFact is owned by the Tampa Bay Times and modestly describes its mission as “fact-checking U.S. politics” and boasts that it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize — a giant pat-on-the-back the MSM gives itself.
 
Bryan White, who operates the blog PolitiFactBias, did an analysis and according to Human Events found “PolitiFact is not that honest fact-checker. Once widely regarded as a unique, rigorous, and reasonably independent investigator of political claims, PolitiFact now declares conservatives wrong three times more often than liberals. More pointedly, the journalism organization concludes that conservatives have flat-out lied nine times more often than liberals.
 
In the three years since the end of the partnership with CQ, PolitiFact has found a total of 323 conservative claims to be untrue, with 119 of those getting Pants on Fire.
 
 
PolitiFact tips the scales leftward in two important ways: first by what the fact twisters choose to study and two, by how it interprets what the individual said, up to and including putting words in their mouths.
Special:
 
Nothing escapes the gimlet eye of these fact twisters, including humor.
 
Breitbart News provides the latest example of fact abuse: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently told a joke that went “Here, we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have the 4th of July. Every year in Iran, they celebrate death to America day, which is the anniversary of Iran in the 1970s taking Americans hostage.”
 
If not exactly humor this Cruz statement certainly qualifies as hyperbole in the service of making a larger point. But PolitiFact ignored the larger point, i.e., it’s foolish to trust an enemy in negotiations, and instead concentrated on the holiday festivities.
 
According to Breitbart, “In order to come to the conclusion that Cruz’s morally clarifying piece of humor was a lie, PolitiFact scoured news archives and hassled no less than five “academic authorities” to see if there is an official “Death to America” holiday in Iran.” And in fact a search discovered, “that not a single use of humor by any Democrat has ever been fact-checked by PolitiFact, much less rated as “mostly false.”
 
 
So what PolitiFact chose to analyze and how they analyzed it shows obvious bias. The lesson from this for conservatives is during the 2016 presidential campaign it pays not to trust the MSM or the MSM’s pet fact checkers.

Breaking News at Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Reagan/PolitiFact-Fact-Checkers-Bias/2015/03/20/id/631565/#ixzz406RppkWB

9 posted on 02/14/2016 7:10:09 AM PST by Enlightened1
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To: Citizen Zed; All
Politi Fact gets all their facts from Left Wing Establishment Media who hate Trump.

They think the Establishment Media is not bias.

So what does that tell you about your “facts”.

10 posted on 02/14/2016 7:11:41 AM PST by Enlightened1
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To: Hoodat

Yes. Kennedy was nominated by Reagan in November 1987. Confirmed in early 1988.

Post debate “fact-checking” is one of the most obvious lies of the MSM. If there were simple errors in dates or numbers that needed to be corrected, that could easily be done as a part of news stories.

The reporters know that these ‘fact checks’ are nothing but editorials in which they engage in direct political arguments over the interpretations of facts. And they also know that their opinions are held in so much contempt by the general public, that if they were honest and labeled it as an editorial, ni one would ever read it.


11 posted on 02/14/2016 7:17:40 AM PST by CaptainMorgantown
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To: Citizen Zed

You ever notice Factcheck.org never fact checks democrats? Wonder why.


12 posted on 02/14/2016 7:18:59 AM PST by McGruff (Flexibility is a good thing, but you shouldn’t be flexible on core principles - Ted Cruz)
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To: Citizen Zed

Who “fact checks” factscheck.org.?


13 posted on 02/14/2016 7:19:29 AM PST by FlingWingFlyer (02-13-2016. America's Blackest Day.)
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To: Citizen Zed
..since the plan last night was to destroy both Trump and Cruz, this kind of nit picking is to be expected.

In the meantime the number of corpses grow-- with the names of those who got in the way of Clinton and Obama on the toe tag...

14 posted on 02/14/2016 7:25:37 AM PST by WalterSkinner ( In Memory of My Father--WWII Vet and Patriot 1926-2007)
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To: Citizen Zed

Some of the factcheck.org comments seem nitpicky.

Illegals at 11.5 million? Other websites have it between 18 million and 40 million (or more) because there is no way for the FED to have an accurate count with the open borders. Notice that the media no longer reports on the childrens’ invasion. It has been going on for well over a year.

The economy grew at 0.7%. Rather nitpicky to claim Trump was wrong. My moneymarket grows at 0.75%, but it is hardly a significant deposit to my account.

Trump lends his campaign money and gets ‘unsolicited’ donations, so he isn’t entirely truthful by saying his campaign is self-funding. Again, rather nitpicky.


15 posted on 02/14/2016 7:26:35 AM PST by TomGuy
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To: Citizen Zed

I think the Fact Checkers need to be fact checked.


16 posted on 02/14/2016 7:38:28 AM PST by iontheball
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To: Citizen Zed

Justice Anthony Kennedy was appointed much earlier than the start of the election year.

This site is a lie. Confirmation is the final step for Kennedy to take his seat, if you recall at the time, Democrats were taking their sweet sweet time.


17 posted on 02/14/2016 7:53:20 AM PST by dila813
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To: napscoordinator

Cruz was correct. No justice has been nominated and confirmed in an election year.


18 posted on 02/14/2016 7:58:06 AM PST by KansasGirl
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To: Citizen Zed

Sen. Ted Cruz claimed that “we have 80 years of precedent of not confirming Supreme Court justices in an election year.” That’s wrong. Justice Anthony Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, an election year.
______________________________________________________
This fact check gotcha shows the ignorance of the fact checker and the moderator in last nights debate. “Precedent” does not mean that absolutely no justice was confirmed during the entire 80 year time frame in question. It means that there is a historical backdrop of eighty years supporting the practice of not confirming justices in an election year. In other words there may have been a justice here and there that obtained confirmation, but you can find instances (precedent) going back 80 years for not doing so during an election year.


19 posted on 02/14/2016 8:02:27 AM PST by iontheball
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To: KansasGirl

Probably true. Kennedy was confirmed in an election year but nominated late the year before.

However, I wonder what is going to happen in January when the Republican President has to deal with a Supreme Court Justice and STILL try to get Congress to pass their agenda. It is going to be a very interesting 13 months. Republicans are going to have to do things in near perfection for this to work.


20 posted on 02/14/2016 8:05:56 AM PST by napscoordinator
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