The following piece is published on Iowa Independent as well as HuffPost's OffTheBus.
This is a companion piece to an analysis of Wednesday's Des Moines Register Republican Presidential Debate.
Factcheck.org, a non-partisan organization that reviews candidate's claims during public events, pointed to six statements made during Wednesday's debate that were worth challenging. They include:
* McCain's promise to make the U.S. "oil independent" within five years, a goal experts say can't be achieved.
"There's just no way," Frank Verrastro, director of the Energy and National Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Factcheck.org. "You can't institute technological change that quickly. Verrastro points out that the U.S. couldn't ramp up alternative fuels that quickly. "It takes 15 years now to turn over the car fleet," he says.
Verrastro's organization and the National Petroleum Council issued a report this summer, commissioned by the secretary of energy, that found the U.S. could reduce its reliance on oil imports by a third by 2030 if it instituted various measures, such as increasing fuel efficiency, domestic sources of oil and non-petroleum fuels.
* Romney's claim that American students score in the bottom quarter among industrial nations.
"Our kids score in the bottom 10 or 25 percent in exams around the world among major industrial nations." That's not so. Actually, the U.S. ranked closer to the 50th percentile than the bottom quarter, according to the most recent rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an internationally standardized study administered to15-year-old schoolchildren in 57 countries.
Students in several nations were tested in 2006. In science, the U.S. ranked 29th out of 57, or at the 49th percentile. And in math, the U.S. ranked 35th out of 57, or at the 39th percentile. The U.S. was not ranked in reading for 2006 because of a testing misprint, but in the previous round of testing in 2003 U.S. students again landed near the middle, scoring 15th out of 29, or at the 48th percentile.