Fact Checking Fun

There’s been no shortage of exaggerations and lies from the stages of the political conventions. Even with help from BS filters and fact-checkers, such as Politifact.com, The Fact Checker, FactCheck.org and The Examiner, it’s impossible to sort it all out. Unfortunately, many voters don’t take these elections seriously enough to go in with an open mind and look for something that at least appears factual in a common sense sort of way, which is exactly what the candidates are hoping for.

After listening to Massachusetts Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren cheer lead at the DNC last night (in which she even managed to mangle up and totally misinterpret a verse from the New Testament), I figured I should a pick a topic of personal interest and try to figure out what's really what.

For example, and this dovetails with the previous post "That Whole "Saved GM' Thing," here are some highlights from former Michigan Governor, Jennifer Granholm, from the DNC. She is obviously not very well informed as to the current state of the auto industry. Instead, the picture she chooses to paint is a distortion of what happened during G.W. Bush's days as a lame duck.

There are a lot of nits that we can pick with this, 
but the one that seems to surface the most is this:
While “Let Detroit go bankrupt” is a quote often attributed to Mitt Romney, it was actually the work of an editor for the New York Times, charged with coming up with a catchy headline for column that Romney had penned during the crisis in the auto industry. Apparently, most people don’t know (or don’t care to know) that Romney is also a car guy and that his father, George Romney, played a large part in the success of American Motors, during it’s days as one of the “Big 4” American auto makers.

No one has questioned that Romney’s business experience, especially in the auto industry, trumps Obama's. In fact, Romney is often vilified for being a successful business person. So what did Romney actually say? He said that the government should have let the automakers go into a “managed bankruptcy”... In his words... "Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation."


For more fact checking fun:

FACT CHECK: Obama And The Phantom Peace Dividend

FACT CHECK: Clinton Claims Of Compromise A Stretch
“THE FACTS: From Clinton's speech, voters would have no idea that the inflexibility of both parties is to blame for much of the gridlock. Right from the beginning Obama brought in as his first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a man known for his getting his way, not for getting along.”

FACT CHECK: Obama promised and failed to keep Janesville, GM plant open
So who was right? Ryan or Obama? Well, it sure wasn’t The Washington Post.

FACT CHECK: 4.5 Million new jobs created under Obama? According Yahoo News...
“CNN found that there has been a net increase of just 300,000 nonfarm payroll jobs since Obama took office. And if you count government jobs, there are actually 400,000 fewer people working today than in January 2009.... Obama's job growth percentages trail far behind those of some other recent presidents, including Bill Clinton (+2.60 percent and +1.60 percent), Ronald Reagan (+1.75 percent and +2.53 percent) and even Jimmy Carter (+2.30 percent).”

Need a break from it all?  This pretty much sums it all up....