Political facts and Campaign Promises.
This thread is dedicated to plain ol' truth in politics.
It should save multiple threads from being created, I think.
This thread should cover things from checking facts on statements and checking campaign promises for facts. politifact.org, snopes.com, and reputable news sources are great for checking the facts on the rumors, campaign promises, statements made by politicians, and so forth. A recent example of this would be: how did Sarah Palin effect the shooting? Was she partially at fault? Stuff like that. Keep it fact checking related, though, as to not get involved with political scandals. If you want to post about political scandals, I recommend an individual thread be created for that, but feel free to post about those in here if you want fact checking done or posted about (I don’t mind.)
This thread should see most of its use during elections when we have facts flying left and right. Slander and Libel should be introduced, I think, into campaigns. But, this thread should be a dump for stuff you guys run across. Chances are, someone will find something awesome about a lie or a truth someone told, and we won’t know about it until you tell us and post a link. And, please, make this multinational! This is not just about American politics.
On to the thread:
I'll cover two subjects:
First one is the Sarah Palin inciting violence.
Did she incite violence? Probably not. In fact, her ability to incite violence in that case would be so very small that it is almost negligible. Americans are more violent than most other industrialized nations.
Anyway, fact-check: did Sarah Palin support violence or did she oppose it like she claimed to have done last March?
Truth.
Palin DID say that she meant take up arms by voting at the ballot, but not actually do violent things.
So, she should be vindicated. I do believe someone pointed out that she was just trying to appeal to the redneck talk and sayings and not actually talking about guns. That appears to be the exact case, so whoever said that, deserves a cookie (I believe it was Robtard.)
On to the next one: Americans need better gun control because we are murderers with our guns, n'stuff.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg, (D-N.J.) said we have 9500 gun murders compared to an average of 200 or less from our European counterparts.
"But the fact of the matter is, when we look at the number of murders in the United States, 2009, we had 9,500 people murdered. When we look around the world, we see large companies -- large countries, the U.K., Germany, Japan had 200 or less killed in a year."
Fact or fiction?
Mostly true. Not really true as he's wrong on even supporting his own data.
We actually killed more in 2009, with guns. It was closer to 10,200, not 9500. That helps his point, though, not hurts it. Indeed, the data shows smaller gun death numbers, by far, than 200, in most European countries, except for Germany. Germany is a tad over 300.
But is that a far number? Not really. It should be a per capita measure. It's 2.72 times the murders occur, per capita, in the US, than Germany. That's faaaaaaaar closer than the lies being presented by this senator. It's very dishonest of him to improperly represent the data, like that. We have over 26 times the number of actual firearm murders but our population is only 3.8 times larger than Germany's. So how does Germany bridge the gap to make the "rest" of the murders catch up to where the US only has 2.72 times the murders, per 1000 people? Simple: The Germans are killing each other in greater number with things other than guns, than we Americans do with weapons other than guns. We use a gun, most of the time: they use other things, I suppose.
Here's how I got my 2.72 times number: Just divide the US's murders per 1000 by Germany's murder per 1000 to get ~ 2.72
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
So what do we have? We have a senator tricking people again with skewed data. Very dishonest and it is annoying. However, the facts he presented were pretty close and, in fact, he could have better illustrated his points with more accurate numbers.
So, I rule this one a "almost true, but it's a douchy and skewed."