Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, John Kasich and movie star Emma Watson.
They all took a recent ride on the AJC Truth-O-Meter, courtesy of those non-partisan fact-checkers at PolitiFact and PolitiFact Georgia.
Abbreviated versions of our fact checks are below.Full versions can be found at www.facebook.com/politifact.georgia.
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Donald Trump on Sunday, March 13th, 2016, in an interview on “Meet the Press” :
Says a YouTube video shows Thomas DiMassimo, the man who rushed Trump at an Ohio rally, “dragging the American flag on the ground like it was a piece of garbage.”
Trump is correct.
A YouTube video posted by DiMassimo shows him dragging a flag on the ground and later standing on it.
DiMassimo is clearly desecrating the U.S. flag in the name of protest.
Flag desecration is offensive to many, but legal under the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
We rate Trump's statement True.
Viral image on Sunday, October 25th, 2015 in a blog post and subsequently reposted on Facebook:
Says Hillary Clinton told the Des Moines Register on Aug. 8, 2015: “I will get the NRA shut down for good if I become president. If we can ban handguns, we will do it.”
Clinton was quoted in The Des Moines Register several times about gun control in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, but she did not say what the post accuses her of saying. Clinton has not advocated for shutting down the NRA or banning handguns outright.
The claim is entirely fabricated. We rate this statement Pants on Fire!
“You know what Truman said, ‘You want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.’ “
John Kasich on Monday, March 14th, 2016 in comments at a town hall in North Canton, Ohio
That statement is often attributed to Truman.
However, there’s no evidence Truman ever actually said that.
We rate Kasich’s statement False.
Emma Watson on Wednesday, February 24th, 2016 in an interview with Gloria Steinem:
“More lives are lost from violence against women, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, suicide, egregious maternal mortality, and other sex-linked causes than were lost during all of the wars and civil strife of the 20th century.”
The claim comes from the book Sex and World Peace by Valerie Hudson, who was citing a UN figure of 163 million missing women in 2005. That’s 10 million more than her estimate of lives lost in all of last century’s strife, 153 million.
But this is using a high estimate for the first measure and a low estimate for the second.
The number of sex-related deaths, which varies from year to year, typically falls within 100 million to 130 million range. The number of deaths due to war, according to most other estimates, is about 200 million. Both numbers are disturbingly high, but it’s not clear that one is definitively higher than the other.
With this caveat, we rate Watson’s claim Half True.
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