Latest Stories By W. Gardner Selby

Showing 181-192 of 635 items

Pants on Fire for Facebook meme about Ted Cruz, Barack Obama, citizenship an online hit

April 2, 2015

 A Facebook meme suggests Canada-born Ted Cruz conveniently flip-flopping on needing to be born in the U.S. to run for president.

 

Pants on Fire! The comments attributed to Cruz don't reflect any actual remarks that we could find.

 

Our look at the meme turned out to be

 

Ted Cruz’s first fact checks as presidential hopeful

March 27, 2015

Fact  checks of Ted Cruz spiked as he declared his candidacy for president.

 

We ended the week by lighting afire a Facebook meme critical of Cruz and rolling in Obama.

 

MORE...

Ted Cruz and the Truth-O-Meter Already Hot

March 22, 2015

Ted Cruz, the lively Texas senator, is declared  his candidacy for president Monday. (Ahem, he tweeted his plans before he spoke.)


Win or lose in that endeavor, the Houston lawyer already has a Truth-O-Meter record drawing lots of online attention. See his ratings through today below. Dig into some of his "greatest hits" in our story starting here. Or gander at a PolitiFact look into his eligibility to run for president (Cruz was born in Canada) here.

 

It's TRUE: Cruz is the longest-serving solicitor general of Texas in history.


 

Global fact-checkers investigate claims about women

March 11, 2015

As the United Nations celebrates International Women’s Day, nonpartisan fact-checkers from five continents looked at claims about women’s lives.

Not so fast: Cops fired, private security hired, crime plummets in Sharpstown?

March 8, 2015

 A website retracted its story stating a Texas community replaced police officers with private security--and crime plunged 61 percent.

 

The yank happened at rare.us last week after Texas Monthly blew a whistle.

 

And now we’ve got the rest of the story about what’s up in part of the Sharpstown section of Houston.

Pete Sessions’ ‘murders every day’ claim about immigrants released by Obama

March 5, 2015

Remember last summer’s Pants on Fire claims about immigrants committing 3,000 murders in Texas?

 

A similar claim singling out Barack Obama just drew four Pinnochio's from The Washington Posts Fact Checker which also revealed the state of Texas has reconfigured its data.

 

(See video of Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Dallas, making his statement at the 23:29 mark of the video posted above this story or go directly here.)

Did Obama say 22 times he couldn’t stop deportations by himself? Almost.

March 2, 2015

Speaker Boehner posted a list supposedly showing 22 times President Obama disavowed his power to stop immigrant deportations without congressional help.

 

That count doesn’t hold up. But Obama made repeated disavowals.

Showing 181-192 of 635 items