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A State of the Union address is often difficult to fact-check, no matter who is president. The speech is a product of many hands and is carefully vetted, so major errors of fact are relatively rare. But State of the Union addresses often are very political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context is sometimes missing. Here is a guide through some of President Obama’s more fact-challenged claims, in the order in which he made them. At the end, we also examine one fishy fact in the Republican response. As is our practice with live events, we do...

Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the "war on poverty," we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state. The actual signing of the "war on poverty" legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs "worked." Of course everything "works" by sufficiently low standards, and everything "fails" by sufficiently high standards. The real question is: What did the "war...

One of the things that attracted me to the political left, as a young man, was a belief that leftists were for "the people." Fortunately, I was also very interested in the history of ideas — and years of research in that field repeatedly brought out the inescapable fact that many leading thinkers on the left had only contempt for "the people." That has been true from the 18th century to the present moment. Even more surprising, I discovered over the years that leading thinkers on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum had more respect for ordinary people than...

Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words — "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today. President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality? That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term "socialism." Those communities all collapsed. It was tried...

Words seem to carry far more weight than facts among those liberals who argue as if rent control laws actually control rents and gun control laws actually control guns. It does no good to point out to them that the two American cities where rent control laws have existed longest and strongest — New York and San Francisco — are also the two cities with the highest average rents. Nor does it make a dent on them when you point out evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic, that tightening gun control laws does not reduce gun crimes, including murder....

Try it! And did you know one can set-up their Google home page in Klingon...? Or that the company's two founders tried to sell Google for a mere $750,000 in 1999? Excite (today minor search player 'Ask') actually said 'pass'... today's Google's worth $200 BILLION... More Google fun facts -here-

You know that smiling woman who was featured on the home page of Healthcare.gov? She asked for her picture to be removed after she was cyber-bullied. She's hiding where nobody can see her — at Healthcare.gov. ~ Conan It turns out that a lot of children could lose their dental insurance under Obamacare. So kids might not be able to go to the dentist. Parents were really upset, while kids said, “Four more years! Four more years!” ~ Fallon According to a new report, over a million Californians are losing their health insurance due to Obamacare. In fact, some...

Some people feel guns are bad and they feel better if they hate gun owners. I beg you to keep things in perspective if you hate guns. Most gun haters claim guns are an accident waiting to happen. I guess so, but walking down the street is an accident waiting to happen also. Let me show it to you. Drunk drivers are a far bigger risk than guns.

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog, Should we broadcast a message to the rest of the world that anyone that can find a way to enter this country and somehow get to a “sanctuary city” can sign up for a plethora of welfare benefits and live a life of leisure at the expense of hard working American citizens? Yes, this question sounds absurd, but what I have just described will essentially be official U.S. government policy if the immigration bill going through Congress becomes law. And unfortunately, Democrats now say that they have the Republican votes that...

A reporter asked me, "Would you prefer that students know information, or how to find information?" Clearly she thought that knowing where to find information was best. Actually knowing facts was, in her mind, not important. That was the old way, the medieval approach, when children were whipped to make them memorize the state capitals and other such irrelevant stuff. Thank goodness, she clearly believed, we have moved on to more civilized ways. Children no longer know anything. All they know is that they must go somewhere to find what they want to know. But why would the reporter believe...

Young black males are at greater risk from their peers than from the police or white civilians. Last week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically. Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws. It was not a white-on-black episode. The shooting involved a Latino of mixed heritage in a violent altercation with a black youth. Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows...

You hear a lot about the politicization of science, but the real problem is the moralization of science. The New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt has made a compelling case that moral differences drive partisan debates over scientific issues. Dan Kahan and others at the Yale Cultural Cognition Project have identified cultural differences that bias how people assimilate information. Together, Haidt and Kahan’s research suggests that what you believe about a scientific debate signals to like-minded people that you are on their side and are therefore a good and trustworthy person. Unfortunately, this means that the factual accuracy of beliefs...

Only a paltry 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming stuck to “factual reporting, according to Pew. Fox News, by comparison, had a breakdown of 55 percent commentary and opinion and 45 percent "factual reporting."

For release March 13, 2013 Gun Facts Version 6.2 Released 13 Years of Debunking Gun Control Myths San Francisco, CA – March 13, 2013: The latest edition of the de facto desk reference for debunking gun control mythology was released today and marks its thirteenth year in production. See www.GunFacts.info. “Another tragedy, and one again the gun control industry is on the move,” said Guy Smith, editor of Gun Facts. “Yet as in 2000, their rush to crush civil rights meets the brick wall of facts, perspective and reason. The gun control industry won’t get far.” Gun Facts categorizes gun...

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward tells POLITICO Playbook that the White House is muddling the facts on the sequester - "a classic case of distortion and confusion." **SNIP** "The White House pushback is a classic case of distortion and confusion," Woodward said in an email to Playbook. "We unfortunately have seen this too often in recent presidential history... I do not think it is willful. They are just mixed up, surprisingly so."

Warning about "weapons designed for the theater of war," President Obama on Wednesday called for immediate action on a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He said that "more of our fellow Americans might still be alive" if the original assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, had not expired in 2004. Last month, in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) promised to introduce an updated version of the ban. She too warned of the threat posed by "military weapons." After the nightmare of Newtown, their concern is understandable. Yet...

While President Barack Obama is moving ahead with executive orders and legislation to further tighten gun control in response to the mass murder committed by Adam Lanza at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., neither the toxicology report on Lanza’s corpse nor the police report on his crime have been completed. Lanza attacked the school on Dec. 14, killing 26 people, including 20 children. Before going to the school, he killed his mother at the home where he lived with her. When police arrived at the school during his murder spree, Lanza shot and killed himself. … Despite...

Old truths decay and new ones are born at an astonishing rate.Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current). Fact-making...

In the wake of the Newtown school massacre, we've noted a strong uptick in our site traffic by people wanting to find out how different the U.S. might be if the nation adopted Canada's much more restrictive firearms laws. This post gathers all our analysis on that topic from 2011 in one place. Who Kills Who We examine the FBI's data on the race of victims and their killers. We find that the vast majority of offenders prefer to kill their own kind (that evidence is borne out elsewhere, where criminals also seem to prefer killing other criminals!) U.S. vs...

<p>Newt Gingrich said that conservatives will have to accept marriage equality after three more states this year voted to allow same sex marriage and more will likely do the same in the 2014 election.</p> <p>The former Speaker of the House said he didn’t expect gay rights to become the “wave” issue it has, but that he can accept the difference between a marriage in a church and a legal document, reported Huffington Post.</p>