Fact Check: Which Republican candidates actually cut spending?

Every Republican presidential candidate has promised to keep government spending in check -- but which ones actually have a track record of doing that?

All say they would cut. In the last debate, Jeb Bush said people in Florida called him "Veto-Corleone" because he vetoed so much spending. Mike Huckabee said the federal government "is not too big to shrink." Chris Christie says he "balanced budgets."

Is it true? There are an almost infinite number of ways that records can be spun. Some focus on cuts in one small program or on small tax cuts. But governors have actual records. So what do they show?

The "Stossel" show crunched the numbers on that -- adjusting them for inflation and population growth. Here's what the data on governors and ex-governors show:

FOR THE RESULTS, SEE THE ARTICLE AT FOXNEWS.COM.

Extended Documentation on Saida Grundy Mocking Rape Victim

From my FoxNews.com article “Boston University prof in racist tweet flap accused of trolling white rape victim”:

The above quotes are excerpts from the Feb. 25 exchange. The extended exchange is here, and the victim’s remark describing how she is a rape victim is truncated in the screenshot, but an extended post can be viewed here. Chamberlin gave permission to publish her name.

Boston University prof in racist tweet flap accused of trolling white rape victim

Boston University, which has already condemned the racist Tweets of an incoming faculty member, has now been sent an outrageous Facebook exchange in which a poster who identifies herself as the controversial sociology professor mercilessly ridicules a white rape victim.

Saida Grundy, a newly hired professor at Boston University who recently said she regrets tweeting that white males are a "problem population," and other racially charged comments, is now accused of Facebook posts in which she appeared to taunt a white rape victim. That victim, Meghan Chamberlin, told FoxNews.com that the posts, an a February public chat, felt “like a kick in the stomach.”

The woman who identified herself as Grundy posted the comments after Chamberlin took issue with a controversial article on race that the Facebook thread had linked to.

“I LITERALLY cry and lose sleep over this,” Chamberlin wrote, adding she had been raped as a child and felt that: “what this article did was tell me that I'm not aloud (sic) to ask for help… Because I am a WHITE woman… So when I read this article… you do understand what that does to me, right? It kills me…”

The woman, who identified herself as Sai Grundy and uses the same photo the professor uses on tweets she acknowledged last week, responded by making fun of the victim’s crying.

“’I literally cry’…. While we literally die,” she said before adding, “try this article. A white woman explaining this issue to other white women… who manages NOT to cry while doing it!”

Chamberlin, the rape survivor, responded: “No really. I got it. You can take your claws out, thanks.”

To which Grundy exploded:

“^^THIS IS THE S**T I AM TALKING ABOUT. WHY DO YOU GET TO PLAY THE VICTIM EVERY TIME PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OUR ALLIES WANT TO POINT OUT RACISM. my CLAWS?? Do you see how you just took an issue that WASNT about you, MADE it about you, and NOW want to play the victim when I take the time to explain to you some s**t that is literally $82,000 below my pay grade? And then you promote your #whitegirltears like that’s some badge you get to wear… YOU BENEFIT FROM RACISM. WE’RE EXPLAINING THAT TO YOU and you’re vilifying my act of intellectual altruism by saying i stuck my “claws” into you?”

Chamberlin responded by trying to leave the discussion. “I am choosing to “exit” this conversation,” she wrote.

But Grundy posted again, finishing with: “go cry somewhere. since that’s what you do.”

Continue reading at FoxNews.com...

Boston University condemns prof's racist tweets after Terrier alums bark

Boston University had a weekend change of heart about a new professor's angry tweets about white people, after FoxNews.com and others reported on the racially-charged comments -- and Terrier alumni threatened to stop writing checks.

Saida Grundy, an incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at the school, tweeted in recent weeks that "white masculinity is THE problem for america’s (sic) colleges," white men are a "problem population,” and that she tries to avoid shopping at white-owned businesses. On Friday, her new employer's spokesman, Colin Riley, told FoxNews.com that the tweets came from Grundy's personal Twitter account and that she was "exercising her right to free speech and we respect her right to do so.”

Then, amid a deluge of angry emails from former students, the school sought to amend the comment.

“The University does not condone racism or bigotry in any form and we are deeply saddened when anyone makes such offensive statements,” Riley told FoxNews.com Saturday.

The tweets were first noticed by a student at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Nick Pappas, who posted them on his website “SoCawlege.com” and questioned how Grundy could teach a diverse classroom given the racial hostility in her tweets.

“You have to teach college-aged white males eventually, no?... this seems like you are unqualified to grade their work as you clearly demonstrate some kind of special bias against them,” he wrote.

Continue reading at FoxNews.com...

Boston University prof under fire for racial tweets

Critics say a newly-hired Boston University professor has crossed the line with recent tweets bashing whites, but the school says it’s simply free speech.

“White masculinity isn’t a problem for america’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for america’s colleges,” Saida Grundy, an incoming assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Boston University, tweeted in March.

In another tweet from January, she wrote: “Every MLK week I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible.”

In another, she called white males a “problem population.”

“Why is white America so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?” she asked.

The tweets were first noticed by student Nick Pappas, who posted them on his website “SoCawlege.com” and questioned how Grundy could be able to teach a diverse classroom given the racial hostility in her tweets.

“You have to teach college aged white males eventually, no?... this seems like you are unqualified to grade their work as you clearly demonstrate some kind of special bias against them,” he wrote.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

ATF misfire? Guide indicates bullets at center of firestorm already banned; agency blames 'error'

It looked like the fix was in. But the ATF says it was just a misfire.

As the ATF faces a firestorm of controversy for seeking public comment on a proposal to ban a popular type of bullet, critics last week claimed the agency may have decided in advance how it would rule.

They pointed to the ATF's latest "Firearms Regulation Reference Guide," released in January 2015. The guide, curiously, did not contain an exemption for popular ".223 M855 "green tip" ammunition" that was included in earlier guides. Without that exemption, the ammunition is illegal to sell. (The change in language was first noticed by Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com.)

So did the ATF already make up its mind?

No, the agency claims. The ATF has responded that the reference guide is not legally binding, so the bullets have not actually been banned yet, and has apologized for leaving the exemptions out of the guide. They say it was an innocent mistake. And the proposed ban is apparently still under consideration.

"[It] was an error which has no legal impact on the validity of the exemptions," ATF public affairs chief Ginger Colbrun told FoxNews.com in an emailed statement, adding that it will be corrected soon.

"The 2014 Regulation Guide will be corrected in PDF format to include the listing of armor piercing ammunition exemptions and posted shortly... ATF apologizes for any confusion caused by this publishing error."

As of Monday, the 2014 guide with the error was no longer available on the ATF website.

Case closed? Perhaps. Gun-rights supporters say that such errors are common for the ATF -- but that it could also have been a tip-of-the-hand that the administration already had reached a decision on banning the bullets.

"This is either real incompetence or ATF got caught with their pants down. With this administration it could be both," Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation told FoxNews.com.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

The author, Maxim Lott, can be reached on Facebook or at maxim.lott@foxnews.com

Google works to rank sites based on ‘truthfulness'

In a step that critics worry will inject political bias into search results, a Google research team released a report this month on ranking search results based on how factual websites are. They propose eventually using that to change Google rankings, which are currently based on website popularity.

The Google researchers give, as an example, websites that say President Obama was born in Kenya; such sites would be penalized in Google rankings, whereas sites that correctly say he was born in the U.S. would get a boost in rankings.

That fact is not controversial, but critics worry that this is a first step towards Google playing God and effectively censoring content it does not like. They fear that skeptics of things like climate change or more immigration (both subjects that Google founders have expressed strong feelings about) might find their websites buried if this ranking system were adopted.

Continue reading at FoxNews.com...

Study: Global warming skeptics know more about climate science

By Maxim Lott | February 12, 2015 | FoxNews.com

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?

Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.

The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.

On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right.

Continue reading at FoxNews.com...

Econ book acclaimed by left based on faulty premise, factual errors, study finds

A book by a French economist who became a darling of 99 percenters and his lefty peers is riddled with errors, cherry-picked data and flawed premises, according to two new studies.

Thomas Piketty's “Capital in the 21st Century,” which New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman called “the most important economics book of the year — and maybe of the decade,” calls for an 80 percent income tax to stop wealth inequality from increasing. The book earned its author an invitation to the White House to meet with Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

But it contains more than 10 factual errors, according to one new study accepted by the Journal of Private Enterprise and conducted by economists Phillip Magness of George Mason University and Robert P. Murphy of the Institute for Energy Research. The errors they report range from relatively simple mistakes such as getting several historical dates wrong to mis-attributing a massive tax increase to President Franklin Roosevelt that was actually passed by President Herbert Hoover, to incorrectly claiming that the minimum wage never increased under either George W. Bush or George H.W. Bush, who both oversaw increases.

The authors write that they see a pattern in the errors.

They also conclude that, in building some of his charts, Piketty switched between data sets in a way that was biased in favor of his argument. In his graph on wealth in the U.S., for instance, Piketty relied on data from one study going up until 1950, then for 1960 he switched to another study, and then for 1970 he went back to relying on the first study again.

The authors conclude that Piketty used “cherry-picked data points to construct a trend line that mirrors his predictions.”

The authors also found that, in one Piketty graph about US historical tax revenue, he only had data going back until 1900; yet he made the graph go back to 1870 by assuming those years were the same as 1900 and by adding or subtracting a seemingly arbitrary number to make the data appear plausible.

For Piketty's response and other alleged errors, see the article on FoxNews.com.

Botched environmental predictions for 2015

By Maxim Lott | Published January 01 | FoxNews.com

You’ve heard the warnings: Global warming could doom humanity. Overpopulation and deforestation will destroy the planet. We’re going to run out of energy.

It isn’t happening right now, experts say, but it could happen in a few decades. Yet, decades ago, experts warned that many catastrophes would happen now – by the year 2015. Yet they have not. FoxNews.com found five predictions that went astray.

1) UN overestimated global warming by 2015

Two decades ago, the UN came up with several models that all predicted that by 2015, the Earth would have warmed by at least a degree Fahrenheit. Yet in the last two decades, there has instead been virtually no warming according to satellite temperature measurements.

Most climate scientists say this is just a temporary pause and that warming will soon pick up again, though some say they now expect to see less warming in the future due to the pause.

2) All Rainforest Species Will Be Extinct

Dr. Paul Ehrich, the President of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, got famous for his 1968 book “the Population Bomb” which predicted that increasing human populations would spell doom.

One part of that doom, he warned in his 1981 book “Extinction,” was that all rainforest species would likely soon go extinct due to environmental destruction.

“Half of the populations and species in tropical moist forests would be extinct early in the next century [the 2000s] and none would be left by 2025,” he warns on page 291. He added that that his model indicated that, on the upper bound, complete extinction would occur as soon as 2010.

Elsewhere in the book, he also wrote that his model’s assumptions were “more realistic” than those typically used and that “unless appropriate steps are taken soon… humanity faces a catastrophe fully as serious as an all-out thermonuclear war.” Continue reading at FoxNews.com to find out what Obama Science Advisor John Holdren predicted in the 1980s...

Loose-lipped ObamaCare adviser's predictions more bad than bold, analysis shows

Excerpt:

Gruber Prediction: Premiums will go down

“What we know for sure the bill will do is that it will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance,” Gruber told the Washington Post in November 2009.

Premiums rose due to ObamaCare by an average of 49 percent, according to a county-by-county analysis done by the Manhattan Institute, proving critics and insurance companies, who had said Gruber’s models were deeply flawed, correct.

“[ObamaCare] will result in individual market premiums increasing, not decreasing, as stated in the Gruber paper,” insurance company Wellpoint wrote in a 2009 paper.

Gruber had simply failed to consider key factors in the plan that Wellpoint correctly predicted would add "between 20 percent and 80 percent to the cost of premiums under reform.”

Specifically, Gruber's analysis assumed everyone would qualify for ObamaCare subsidies, the company determined. Gruber’s prediction before the Senate in 2009, that ObamaCare would guarantee “sizeable premium savings for [the] young" and that a family with income of $38,000 "would save, on average, $8,550," also failed to pan out, according to the Manhattan Institute analysis.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

Rejected Asian students sue Harvard over admissions that favor other minorities

By Maxim Lott | Published November 18, 2014 | FoxNews.com

Harvard University's affirmative action policies, which the school says are aimed at achieving diversity on the vaunted campus of Cambridge, discriminate against Asians who often can't get in despite having higher test scores and grade-point averages than black and Hispanic students who are accepted, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

Edward Blum, who runs the Project on Fair Representation, which filed the suit on behalf of Asian students who were rejected by the school, said it is a clear case of favoring certain racial groups over others.

“Quotas and racial balancing are strictly against the law,” said Blum, whose group sued the University of Texas on behalf of a white applicant over its affirmative action admissions policies in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

Report: State budgets fudge numbers to hide massive debt

America's red ink runs much deeper than you think.

Aside from the nearly $18 trillion national debt, many state governments are looking at future budgets that are trillions of dollars in the red. And they've hidden the numbers by dramatically under-reporting that debt, according to a new report by the think tank State Budget Solutions.

The group looked at what are known as "unfunded liabilities" -- or debt states will owe down the road. It found a number of states are fudging their numbers -- big-time -- using tricks like assuming their stock investments will soar.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

What Campaign Spending? Americans spend more on Halloween than on midterms

Campaign spending rose to nearly $4 billion this year, which is a new record for a midterm election. That is a lot – but not compared to what Americans spend on Halloween, according to an analysis from the Institute for Justice.

Americans’ Halloween spending on candy, costumes, and decorations is projected to hit $7.4 billion this year, or almost twice the campaign spending of all midterm races combined.

According to the National Retail Federation, that’s about $77 a person. That includes $2.8 billion on costumes (Americans actually spend more on adult costumes than kids’ costumes), $2.2 billion on candy; and almost as much on decorations that may or may not get taken down by Christmas.

Here are some other activities America spends more on than politics:

• Laundry detergent ($5.9 billion)

• Cosmetic surgery ($7 billion)

• Dolls and action figures ($4.1 billion)

• Pet grooming and boarding ($4.4 billion)

• Tea ($10 billion)

• One Zumwalt DDG-1000 Navy Destroyer ($7.3 billion)

• Surf- and skate- boards ($7.2 billion as of 2008)

• Pornography ($10-12 billion)

• Concerts ($4.3 billion)

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

Death spiral? Short-term health plans grow as cheap alternative to ObamaCare

A fast-growing, short-term alternative to ObamaCare that allows customers to get cheap, one-year policies could put the government-subsidized plan into a death spiral.

The plans, the only ones allowed for sale outside of ObamaCare exchanges, generally cost less than half of what similar ObamaCare policies cost, and are increasing in popularity as uninsured Americans grapple with the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The catch -- that the policies only last for a year -- is not much of a deterrent, given that customers can sign up for ObamaCare during open-enrollment periods if their short-term coverage is not renewed.

“Applications rose 30 percent compared to last year,” eHealthInsurance.com Enrollment Specialist Carrie McLean told FoxNews.com.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

Gulf states fight back as feds seek to reel in recreational fishing season

Gulf Coast charter captains say the feds are ruining their businesses by needlessly cutting their fishing season in response to complaints from commercial fishermen, and now their state lawmakers are stepping up to tackle the issue.

This year's federal fishing season for red snapper was initially set at 40 days long, but then regulators slashed it to just 9 days. Recreational fishing captains say the federal policy is destroying their business for the year and has forced them to cancel hundreds of already-scheduled trips with customers who want to fish.

"I already had the boats sold out for the season and then I had to cancel those trips because I couldn't provide the service," Capt. Mark Hubbard, a recreational fishing captain out of Madeira Beach, Fla., told FoxNews.com.

Continue reading at FoxNews.com...

California prof's required reading paints Usama bin Laden as a freedom fighter

Usama bin Laden was a freedom fighter and the U.S. is a “neocolonial power,” according to a California state university teacher whose writings are required reading for his political science students.

Emmit Evans, a political science lecturer at the public university Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, requires students in his "World Food Systems" class to read the textbook he co-authored, "The Other World." In the book, about politics in the developing world, Evans offers up a sanitized version of the 9/11 mastermind and the terrorist group he headed.

Read more at FoxNews.com...

It's time to arm teachers, says lawmaker whose son attended school with Colorado shooter

The 18-year-old student who stormed into his Colorado school last month with a shotgun and a bandolier of bullets across his chest, fatally shooting a classmate and setting fire to the library, provided fresh ammunition for one lawmaker's bill that would allow teachers to carry guns in schools.

The Dec. 13 incident struck a chord with Republican state Sen. Ted Harvey, whose own son attends the school, in Centennial. Harvey, whose wife is a schoolteacher, said armed teachers at Arapahoe High School might have been able to act even more quickly than the two staff members being hailed as heroes after running toward the library, where James Pierson, 18, had gunned down Claire Davis and ignited a Molotov cocktail.

“I don't want my wife and kids to be sitting ducks,” Harvey told FoxNews.com. He said his own son was on the debate team with Pierson, who took his own life as the two staff members, including school resource officer James Englert, who was armed, and Rod Mauler, an unarmed school security guard and retired deputy, closed in on him.

Read more at FoxNews.com...

White House website at odds with latest Obama statement

Millions of health insurance plans have been cancelled after ObamaCare went into effect, and President Obama backed away Monday from his previous oft-repeated statement that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

But he may want to glance at his own website, WhiteHouse.gov, which still states: "For Americans with insurance coverage who like what they have, they can keep it. Nothing in this act or anywhere in the bill forces anyone to change the insurance they have, period."

That appears in a section of the WhiteHouse.gov website labeled "health reform details." The exact same language also appears in the Department of Health and Human Services' online description of the law.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...

ObamaCare price hikes hit 'red states' hardest

Experiencing sticker-shock at the price of insurance on ObamaCare exchanges?

That's more likely if you live in a "red state" that didn't vote for Obama, according to price data compiled by the Heritage Foundation. In red states, premiums for 27-year-olds rose an average of 78% on ObamaCare exchanges, whereas in "blue states" that voted for Obama, premiums rose a smaller 50%.

Senate critics of ObamaCare say the difference is one way in which the bill is unfair.

"It’s unfair, outrageous and unacceptable," Senator John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who is also an orthopedic surgeon, said in a statement to FoxNews.com.

Continue reading on FoxNews.com...