Accurate facts win the war, remember that Herman...

Politifact:

So how much of the U.S. debt, exactly, does China hold? In a speech at a tea party event in Iowa on April 16, 2011, potential Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said it's 26 percent...

We e-mailed a spokeswoman at Friends of Herman Cain to substantiate the figure and did not hear back....

More than two-thirds of the debt is held by U.S. residents and institutions. When you look at everyone who holds U.S. treasury security, China's share drops to 8.1 percent ($1.15 trillion out of $14 trillion).

In other words, Cain should have dropped in some qualifiers to make his statement accurate. For example, he could have said "among the foreign holders of U.S. debt, China ranks first and holds 26 percent." But he didn't. Cain said simply that China "is holding 26 percent of our debt." There are a couple ways to consider debt, but using the two most common, Cain is either off by more than double or more than triple. We rate Cain's statement False.

Herman Cain wrecking the case against Obamacare

I'm not a supporter of Canadian style health care, but we have to use accurate statistics or we'll lose ground in this fight. The left is going to attack us, so please let's double-check our numbers:

Politifact:

Cain told The Root, a black perspectives online magazine: "In Canada, the number of CT scan machines per 1,000 people is like one-tenth of what we have here in this country. That's why people have to wait."

That’s a huge difference, so PolitiFact decided we’d pass this statement through our own diagnostic equipment to see whether Cain’s prognosis is accurate...

Unfortunately Cain would not tell us how he determined the number of CT scanners in Canada and the United States. In fact, neither he nor anyone from his staff would say anything to us beyond, "I don’t think we’re going to comment."

But PolitiFact did find data quantifying the number of CT scans per capita....

Canada has fewer CT scanners per capita than Greece and Portugal, two countries on the verge of bankruptcy, and it certainly has fewer than the United States, but not "like one-tenth." It’s more like one-third....

If Cain had said Canada has one-third the number of CT scanners of the United States, he would have been correct and then we could have examined whether this lack of capacity really does make Canada’s system inferior.

That’s not what he said, though, and it doesn’t take a 3-D X-ray imager to know that one-tenth is different than one-third.

If we distort the case to win a battle, we're going to lose the war.