Written by Matt Gertz for Media Matters for America

Another day, another dishonest Fox News chart. This time Fox is twisting the data to support Newt Gingrich’s claim that President Obama is the “food stamp president” because “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”

On today’s edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Mike Huckabee agreed, saying that “what Newt says remains factual: more people have gotten on food stamps under Barack Obama as he’s president than ever before. So it’s true.” Guest host Eric Bolling agreed, adding that “under Obama the program has increased by 45 percent in three years.” During the segment, Fox amplified the point with the following chart:

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Written by Robert Parry

After the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin, its oldest and possibly most renowned delegate, recommended that the new American political framework could be a model for Europe, suggesting “a Federal Union and one grand republic of all its different states and kingdoms, by means of a like Convention.”

Of course, Franklin’s suggestion fell on deaf ears in Europe where nation states already had long histories of deep-seated grievances against one another. Forming an enduring union proved hard enough for the 13 American states with their much shallower differences.

Ignoring Franklin’s advice, Europe remained sharply divided and those rivalries threw the world into periodic fits of bloody chaos. Two powerful dictators – Napoleon and Hitler – would try and fail to unify the Continent by force. It would not be until the last half of the 20th Century when a loose federation of democratic European states would take shape as the European Union.

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