A Facebook compendium of thoroughly documented facts and fact checks about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

I don’t really like Facebook and I don’t really use Facebook. But I’ve noticed that it’s the place where crazy, uninformed right-wingers spread around their nonsense without consequence. Among these people are relatives of mine. It’s embarrassing. I suspect I’m not alone.

While I think it’s unlikely that I’ll change their minds, I do think it’s possible to keep them from saying crazing things. Well, I think it’s possible to keep them from saying so many crazy things. If nothing else, maybe some will follow my example and seek to backup their crazy assertions with proof.

So I’ve been regularly posting factual data from mainstream, centrist and right-wing sources and backing them up with ample evidence and links. If you’d like to do the same on Facebook, please feel free to reshare these links and copy the excerpts knowing that they are all legit.

I won’t make a fool of you. But then again, you don’t have to take my word for it…which is the whole point.

Romney says Obama “threw our Isreali friends under the bus.” The Israeli President and Defense Minister disagree. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/277073772394723
The Washington Post says “the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/456729131016645
The Washington Post says, “The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/337577179668425
Foreign Policy Magazine points out that Republicans initiated, and Paul Ryan voted for, the military cuts Romney blames on Obama. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/263132427138560
CBS Evening News quotes Standard and Poor’s report, specifically blaming the Republican Congress, of which Paul Ryan is an influential member, for the U.S. credit downgrade. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/429891933714104
The American Conservative says there’s nothing small government about Romney/Ryan.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/345191155571668
America’s top ranking military officer contradicts Romney’s statements about Iran. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/349624315126710
The Weekly Standard criticizes Romney for “failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we’re fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it?” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/487416077935198
The American Conservative says, “Mitt Romney has no intention of saying anything that his audience doesn’t want to hear,” and calls his convention speech “infantilizing.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/280386948742003
Barack Obama is very popular in Poland, where Mitt Romney claims Obama “abandoned our friends.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/358354654241069
Fortune magazine quotes Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as saying, “The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can’t speak to that in an exact way so I better just not,” when pressed about the falsehoods in Paul Ryan’s attacks.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/411765985539727
Romney says Obama will raise taxes on small businesses. PolitiFact verifies that Obama has cut taxes for small businesses 17 times so far. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/10151854681265283
PolitiFact and tax data disprove Romney’s assertion than raising taxes on millionaires raises taxes on small business. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/10151854646455283
Romney says Obama went on an “apology tour”. PolitiFact proves this to be false. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/158151710975220
Mitt Romney cites Steve jobs as an example for the Republican party. Jobs offered to help Obama’s reelection campaign before he died. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/428647627177248
The New York Times says Republicans and Romney “have offered precious little of substance but a lot of bromides meant to convey profundity and take passive-aggressive digs at President Obama.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/198580320272920
A former Bain colleage of Romney’s says, “I believed he was making a mistake by framing himself as a job creator. That was not his or Bain’s or the industry’s primary objective. The objective of the LBO business is maximizing returns for investors.” The Guardian points out that the Republican congress “regularly blocked any and all job creation measures ever since Obama’s stimulus bill.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/225684797557300
The Congressional Budget Office shows that Bush’s tax cuts are largely responsible for both the the growing U.S. debt and deficit. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151853918845283&set=a.40017285282.62164.717105282&type=1
The York Times show that Paul Ryan criticized Obama for not using a debt reduction plan that Ryan, himself, opposed. http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/496744383688897
Politico shows that Paul Ryan “consistently and loyally voted to increase the debt. He did not take political risks or buck his party to combat “our exploding deficits” then. Instead, he voted for 65 different pieces of legislation to expand the debt.”
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/193430504123967
The New York Time writes that Chris Christie “said his state needed his austere discipline of slashed budgets, canceled public projects and broken public unions, but did not mention that New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate than when he took over, and never had the revenue boom he promised from tax cuts.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/475879322437092
Rick Santorum attacks Obama on welfare reform, despite the attack being widely discredited.
http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/434546076596523
A representative of the Romney campaign says, “‎”We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/337885672970902
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says, “We already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation.” http://www.facebook.com/emortensen/posts/441360942574278