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Doing the Job Media Won't Do: Fact-checking Obama's Gulf Spill Address By Lachlan Markay Created 06/16/2010 - 17:12 Plenty of prominent media figures were upset with President Obama over his substandard address to the nation last night (full text [1]). While most are distraught, none seem to be doing what should be the essential journalistic task of the day: pointing out all of the factual misstatements the president made. So, in absence of a serious attempt at fact-checking from the legacy media, let us undertake some of our own. In all, the president misrepresented the federal government's--and especially his cabinet's--role...

Despite efforts by Wikipedia's parent company to rapidly purge porn from its servers over the weekend, the original images that the online encyclopedia's co-founder reported to the FBI are still up on the site — along with an entire category called “nude children” and other photos of naked children. Last week, FoxNews.com asked dozens of Wikimedia Foundation’s corporate donors — including Microsoft, Google, Best Buy, Ford Foundation, Open Society Institute, USA Networks and Yahoo! — for comment about the vast pornographic content on the company's educational servers. (The Wikimedia Foundation is the tax-exempt nonprofit behind Wikimedia Commons and its Wiki...

MULTIPLE ATTEMPTS TO REACH FACTCHECK STAFF ABOUT OBAMA’S PURPORTED COLB ARE IGNORED The Post & Email has tried on several occasions to reach the staff at Factcheck.org, an organization which describes itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.” However,...

Dr. Ronald J. Polland, PhD, has posted on YouTube a series of videos that are part of a book he has been writing for two years. The title is “Fraud in the USA: The end of the birth certificate controversy.” As described in his, “About Me” video, Dr. Polland’s expertise is in Research and Program Evaluation, with over 31 years of post-doctoral scientific research experience. He is also the leading authority on scanning, photographing, (and videotaping) both sides of authentic, paper Hawaiian COLBs. Because of YouTube length restrictions, Chapter 1 has been split over four parts (uploaded now) and Chapter...

I hope that my first four videos have opened everyone's eyes to the levels of deceit, deception and disinformation that both Factcheck and Politifact have proffered. They have been hiding behind a facade of false respectability and facile "fact checking" while at the forefront of the attacks on our Constitutional rights to know the truth about the person who occupies the White House. I hope you've had a chance to let them marinate, because here comes the bombshell that blows all of them out of the water. Here is a link to the playlist, http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?=C2281523DF8C0230 where you can watch all...

Bill Maher was clearly out of his league Sunday when he made an absurd claim about Brazil being off oil for decades only to be corrected by a significantly more knowledgeable George Will. As the Roundtable discussion of ABC's "This Week" turned to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, host Jake Tapper mentioned -- without the vulgarity -- what Maher said on HBO's "Real Time" about President Obama not "getting more shall we say guff" for this crisis. Maher concluded his answer by erroneously saying, "I mean, Brazil got off oil in the last 30 years, we certainly...

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, "mainstream" media confused the public over whether Obama ever released any real proof of his claim to being born in Hawaii. The confusion continues. Jonathan Alter, senior editor at Newsweek magazine, told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on February 20, 2009 that "The Obama campaign actually posted his birth certificate from a Hawaii hospital online." But Alter lied, since "the Obama campaign" never "actually posted his birth certificate from a Hawaii hospital online." Remarkably, no hospital in Hawaii yet lays definitive claim to be the birthplace of the sitting President. .. On the FactCheck.org website, the claim...

This e-mail claims that because of the new health care law, the IRS will have to hire 16,500 agents to audit Americans and enforce penalties for people who don't want to buy health insurance. Is this true? This has to do with the new taxes, subsidies and tax credits that will be generated by the new health care law and how they will be administered and collected. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com looked at the claim and found that the math used to arrive at the figure is - at best - fuzzy.

The two-year anniversary of “Passportgate” was this past Monday, March 14. Passportgate was the covert “accessing” of passport records by three contractors at the State Department. Two of the contractors were fired. The contractor who was not fired, but only disciplined, worked for The Analysis Corporation. John O. Brennan is the president of The Analysis Corporation. He is also a former CIA official and is now Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. The dates of access are January 9, February 21 and March 14, 2008. The initial reports indicated only a breach of Obama’s records. Later it...

Apparently, the story at Red State ("Obama: The Will Of The People Be Damned - I’LL Decide Who Can Go Fishing") has touched a nerve on liberal websites. They are now claiming that it's all a hoax and there's absolutely no truth to it. Here's an example:President Obama, though remains in news but this time, there is a different reason for his being in news. Anti-Obama extremists are going mad and wild against him and every time, they try to hit him through different angles and issues. Although, that’s not a critical matter yet some people are going just crazy...

Many of the same news organizations and research groups today dismissing concerns about Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility were far more eager to cover the issue when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was the subject. An archive search shows the question of McCain's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president was actively pursued by Democratic Party activists and the mainstream media in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, despite the ridicule now heaped upon those questioning Obama's qualifications under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. In an article published Feb. 28, 2008, months before McCain was nominated for...

WASHINGTON – Beware of politicians quoting poll numbers. That was one lesson from the White House health policy conference Thursday as lawmakers in both parties cherry-picked survey results, ignored contrary findings and presented public opinion, which is highly nuanced on these questions, as a slam-dunk. Claims, counterclaims and statistics flew through the room in the daylong talkfest by President Barack Obama and lawmakers from both parties. Some didn't hold up to the facts. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada suggested his party hasn't been preparing to do an end-run around the normal legislative process to pass a health care...

Whether or not a reconciliation bill on health care meets the intent of the legislative procedure is certainly a matter for legitimate debate. But Reid said reconciliation has been used 21 times since 1981, and that most of the time, it's been Republicans who have initiated it. We find that there have been 22 reconciliation votes, 14 of them by a Republican-controlled Congress, and that it makes more sense -- in light of the debate over making an end-run around the 60-vote threshold -- to focus on the reconciliation bills that passed without a supermajority. But even then, Republicans have...

I've updated my blog to include the e-mail from Janice Okubo confirming that they assign birth certificate numbers in the state registrar's office and the day they do that is the "Date filed by state registrar". The pertinent portion from Okubo's e-mail: In regards to the terms “date accepted” and “date filed” on a Hawaii birth certificate, the department has no records that define these terms. Historically, the terms “Date accepted by the State Registrar” and “Date filed by the State Registrar” referred to the date a record was received in a Department of Health office (on the island of...

The Associated Press found ten whoppers in President Obama's State of the Union address. they are detailed here. Ed Morrissey was surprised, not that AP found errors, but rather that it found "only ten" in the speech: Maybe the Associated Press got as tired as everyone else listening to Barack Obama’s lengthy State of the Union speech last night and stopped paying attention after an hour. Or perhaps AP only found ten because it assigned less than half the number of fact-checkers to the task than it detailed to delve into Sarah Palin's book with a fine-toothed comb. Indeed, Morrissey...

This article has 23 Fact Checks on Obama's talk...Here is one of them Obama State of the Union Fact Check # 6 – Pretending to be a Budget Cutter – The Budget Freeze That Wasn’t! 1/27/2010 - The president formally announced his plan to supposedly freeze some spending for 3 years. He may call it a spending freeze but his plan does not freeze spending. He’s counting on you to think that when he says spending freeze it means spending will remain at the same level over the next few years. That’s not true. His idea of a spending freeze...

President Barack Obama, who once considered government spending freezes a hatchet job, told Americans on Wednesday it's now part of his solution to the exploding deficit. He didn't explain what had changed. His State of the Union speech skipped over a variety of complex realities in laying out a "common-sense" call to action. A look at some of his claims and how they compare with the facts:

"We got our 11-member investigative team together to look into the Obama speech on the economy given today at the liberal think-tank, the Brookings Institution. They found 10 pieces of solid Brookings Bull very quickly…and they’re still coming up with more (there are plenty). Here’s the first glance... ...Obama’s Brookings Bull # 3 - Republicans Caused this Mess 12/8/9 OBAMA: We were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve. FACTS: While republican...

More than a few Times-Union readers want to know: Is Barack Obama eligible to be president of the United States? All the independent fact-checking sources, some of which did extensive original research on the issue, conclude that Obama is a natural born citizen, having been born on American soil in Honolulu, and is thus eligible to be president.

Sarah Palin -- the Associated Press wants folks to believe -- is so pat ently unqualified as a political leader that no one, absolutely no one, could possibly take her seriously. Except, it seems, the Associated Press. Indeed, the latest example -- in which the AP sent 11 (count 'em: 11) reporters to "fact-check" Palin's new book, "Going Rogue" -- suggests that the agency is pathologically obsessed with the former Alaska governor and '08 GOP veep candidate. Gee, what on earth are they afraid of? AP didn't send 11 reporters to fact-check President Obama's two books (it didn't bother to...