2012 Presidential Election, Fact Checking | featured news

President Obama and Mitt Romney met for the third and final debate Monday night, where they tackled foreign policy issues. Below, CBSNews.com takes a closer look at the candidates' assertions on issues relating to Iraq, Russia, Iran, the size of the military, the economy and energy...

...As we enter into the final weeks of this bruising presidential campaign, we expect to hear all sorts of poll-tested, factually-challenged messages again and again — simply because the campaigns have data that shows these claims resonate with votes.
In that vein, a new ad released by the Romney campaign is almost a “greatest hits” version of claims that have been thoroughly debunked by fact checkers, including this column. Let’s spin the record once again!

Debate moderator Candy Crowley interjected during Mitt Romney's remarks in Tuesday's presidential debate, saying that President Obama "did in fact" call the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya an act of terror the day after the incident.

USA TODAY's Paul Davidson, Tim Mullaney, Gregory Korte, Susan Davis and Aamer Madhani took a deeper look at some of the claims Obama and Romney made in the second debate.

Vice President Joe Biden has mangled a heaping helping of facts over the years. Despite being newer to presidential campaign politics, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan has already earned something of a reputation for taking flying leaps past reality.

President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney spun one-sided stories in their first presidential debate, not necessarily bogus, but not the whole truth.

... Romney has falsely accused Obama of “apologizing for America” many times before. The line has been a dependable applause-getter with conservative audiences. But we found no basis for this claim in Obama’s previous speeches and remarks. And other fact-checkers came to similar conclusions.

This dispute is typical of election-year spin. Romney and Ryan want it both ways: credit for cutting spending without detailing what programs would suffer. That allows Obama to fill in the blanks and scare voters by warning that their favorite federally funded program will be decimated.

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan declined on Tuesday to back away from statements in his party convention speech that nonpartisan fact checkers have branded as false or misleading.

Paul Ryan's vice presidential acceptance speech ran into a lot of trouble with fact-checkers and journalists. It seemed like some reporters' heads were going to explode on Twitter as Ryan spoke. For instance, he blasted President Obama for not doing more to keep a GM plant in his hometown open. The problem was that the plant closed before Obama took office. He also criticized Obama for rejecting recommendations from a debt commission that he himself sat on, and whose findings he also rejected.