page-98293 [view: normal]

The debate over health care reform has revealed a couple of promises that we missed when we were compiling our Obameter database. One involves Obama's promise to Planned Parenthood in 2007 that reproductive health care will "be at the heart" of his reform plan. A week ago, we probably would have rated that In the Works. But after the House approved an amendment putting restrictions on abortion cov...

One year ago, Barack Obama held a giant celebration in Grant Park in Chicago and spoke of his goals for the presidency. "This is our time," he said, "to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, ...

As Democratic health care reform bills move toward votes in the House and the Senate, supporters and opponents alike have tried to harness public opinion polls to bolster their own arguments. One recent example came during the Nov. 1, 2009, edition of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos, during a question-and-answer session with White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.STEPHANOPOULOS:...

When we launched the Obameter in mid January, all 505 campaign promises in our database began with a rating of No Action. We figured that as the Obama administration made progress — or failed to make progress — we'd update the ratings. But now, 10 months later, we're a little behind. We haven't been able to keep up with the huge number of promises (it now totals 515 because we've discovered 10 mor...

The entries for our Name That Health Plan contest covered the spectrum from serious to funny, from silly to angry. As you'll recall, we started the contest because we couldn't remember the name of the Democratic health care plan we'd been writing so much about. It dawned on us that neither the White House nor the Democrats had given the plan a name — or at least one that people could remember. So ...

Lots of people were surprised to hear that President Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. After all, he was just elected last fall and hasn't yet finished a full year in office. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was recognizing Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," and particularly noted "Obama's vision...

A Saturday Night Live skit over the weekend showed President Barack Obama admitting what he's accomplished so far: "jack" and "squat." "There are those on the right who are angry. They think that I'm turning this great country into something that resembles the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but that's just not the case," said actor Fred Armisen, who plays Obama. "When you look at my record it's ver...

The Republican National Committee launched a new ad attacking health care reform as a big tax increase. "Barack Obama and Democrats promise that health care reform will lower costs, but their plans deliver increased taxes," the ad says, adding "they've even proposed a tax for not having health insurance." The tax in the Democrats' bills won't affect anyone who has insurance. But if health care ref...

When we first saw a copy of the now-viral video of young school kids singing the praises of President Barack Obama on Sept. 24 ("Hooray, Mr. President, we honor your great plans/To make this country's economy No. 1 again!"), we looked at our watches to see how long it would take for Republican leaders to react. Turned out, not long. The following morning, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele sent out a blast e-mail with a link to the video and a plea for donations to the RNC to "fight this leftist propaganda and elect more Republicans this year and ... >>More...

It's been a summer of exaggerations and falsehoods in the health care debate. If you've been following PolitiFact, it probably seemed like all the action was on the Truth-O-Meter. But we've also been updating lots of campaign promises for our Obameter feature. With each one, the Obameter becomes a richer and more fascinating database that explores the status of President Barack Obama's promises --...

Sound familiar? The president was accused of being "a socialist, not a Democrat." His plan was described as "undisguised state socialism." One critic, who controlled some powerful media outlets, suggested that communists had infiltrated the president's administration. Those are some of the attacks that Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced in the 1930s -- attacks cited recently by President Barack Obama...

On the Sunday talk shows, President Obama did the political equivalent of hitting for the cycle, appearing on shows on four English-language networks, plus Spanish-language Univision. Each was taped separately with a different host, but Obama managed to hit virtually the same talking points on each show. You could choose any show and have a pretty good idea of what he said on the others -- the pri...

To show that insurance companies can be callous, President Barack Obama recently cited the case of an Illinois man who Obama said had died because of an insurer's decision. "More and more Americans pay their premiums, only to discover that their insurance company has dropped their coverage when they get sick, or won't pay the full cost of care," the president told a joint session of Congress on Se...

The issue that drove Rep. Joe Wilson to become a heckler during President Barack Obama's health care address on Sept. 9, 2009, was the question of whether illegal immigrants would receive coverage from Democratic health care reforms. On the night of Obama's speech, we ruled that Wilson's outburst — shouting "You lie!" after Obama said that health reform would not insure illegal immigrants — was Fa...

Seeking to jump-start efforts to pass a health care bill, President Barack Obama defended his reform plan in a speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday night. Obama repeated several of his principles for reform, rebutted attacks from critics, and sought to explain the complex plan so that voters could understand it. Here's a guide to what Obama said and how his statements — or similar on...

Republicans have been complaining for weeks that President Obama was trying to rush his health care reform bill through Congress. To make their point now, they've gone to the dogs.In an Aug. 13 op-ed in the Washington Examiner, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour invoked Bo, the White House dog, to illustrate how quickly Obama has tried to pass the 1,000-page bill. Barbour, who chairs the Republican Go...

President Barack Obama plans to speak to the nation's schoolchildren on Sept. 8. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the speech will be about "the importance of persisting and succeeding in school." Harmeless topic? Not according to the Republican Party of Florida, which released a statement "condemning President Obama's use of taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s children to his ...

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama was highly critical of the Bush administration response to Hurricane Katrina, and he vowed things would improve when he was president. In all, we found he made 17 campaign promises related to Katrina and New Orleans. As the fourth anniversary of the devastating hurricane was commemorated in the Gulf states last week, we decided to see how Obama has fa...

We don't expect President Obama to remember everything we write about him, but when he repeats a claim we had earlier found to be False, we think it's worth calling him out.On Aug. 20, 2009, President Obama held a discussion and conference call at a national health care forum sponsored by Organizing for America, the successor to Obama for America, his campaign organization. In response to a questi...

Our Truth-O-Meter has been overheating lately because of all the fact-checking we've been doing on the health care debate. In the past month, PolitiFact has published 38 items on health care, 20 of which have been rated False or Pants on Fire. Our item about insurance companies considering pregnancy a pre-existing condition (True!) was the 1,000th Truth-O-Meter ruling. This weekend we celebrate ou...

This week, alert readers asked us how we were rating President Barack Obama's stance on the public option. That's a promise, right? they asked. Well, no. We looked in our Obameter database for a promise the public option and couldn't find one. We are now adding a promise on the public option to our database. But make no mistake: The public option was rarely debated or even mentioned on the campaig...

With polls showing seniors are the most skeptical about the health care reform bills working their way through Congress, President Obama's sought to ease some of their concerns during a town hall meeting with a little high-powered name-dropping. The name: AARP. Several times at the town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., on Aug. 11, Obama specifically mentioned AARP's support for health care reform. It's l...

President Barack Obama held another town hall to discuss health care, this time visiting Portsmouth, N.H. The forum was considerably less raucus than some members of Congress have faced in recent days. Nobody tried to shout him down or disrupt the meeting, and it appeared there were many Obama supporters in the audience. We found two items to check right away, and we're still reviewing the transcr...

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, urged her supporters to oppose Democratic plans for health care reform on her Facebook page. "As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!" wrote Palin in a note posted Aug. 7,...

When President Barack Obama gave a speech on the economy in Wakarusa, Ind., on Aug. 5, 2009, one of his statements raised the eyebrows of one alert PolitiFact reader.Obama, touting an element of his stimulus package, said that a tax cut “began showing up in paychecks of 4.8 million Indiana households about three months ago.”That struck our reader as odd because the Census Bureau pegs Indiana’s pop...