Another false email smear is turning up in inboxes across the country spreading incorrect information about Michelle based on a completely fake room service bill. The smear inaccurately claims Michelle dined on lobster and caviar at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel on October 15th.

The truth is, the incident never happened. Michelle was not even staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The New York Post had a bad source and has since retracted the story.

What’s more, Michelle was not even in New York at the time of the incident. Rather, she was on a plane heading away from a campaign event in Fort Wayne, Indiana where she spoke.

Snopes.com has also debunked this smear – giving it a status rating of “False.”

We don’t know much about the author behind this email smear, but we do know that smears like this are part of a broader, shadowy strategy to scare people who aren’t very familiar with Michelle by spreading anonymous, false information.

Fight back with the truth: make sure anyone who sees this smear also sees this page. Together we can make sure these negative and divisive attacks don’t affect this election.

The McCain campaign is claiming that Barack Obama’s record on crime is “far outside the mainstream” but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

During Barack Obama’s career in the United States Senate, he was a strong proponent of tougher measures to fight crime and provide more resources to local law enforcement officers:

• Barack co-sponsored legislation that became the first major anti-meth federal law.
• He supported the COPS programs that provided much-needed resources to local police officers.
• He cosponsored a bill creating a national database on sex offenders: http://www.nsopr.gov/.
• And he voted to reauthorize the landmark Violence Against Women Act.

As a state senator, Obama worked tirelessly to make our streets safer by toughening drug laws and gang legislation. Barack supported increasing penalties for marijuana possession, and got tough on gangs in Chicago – making recruiting for a gang at schools a crime.

Barack also made it easier for victims and their families to find closure after experiencing a vicious crime. By removing the statue of limitations for first-degree murder and extending it for sexual crimes in Illinois, Barack opened doors for law enforcement to prosecute more cases.

For their tough records on crime, Barack Obama and Joe Biden earned the endorsement of the National Association of Police Organizations, a group that represents over 2,000 police organizations across the United States.

The McCain campaign’s attempt to smear Barack’s record on crime is just another example of the desperate, negative tactics his campaign has embraced. Fight back with the truth: make sure anyone who has seen this smear also sees this page.

Right-wing hatchet man and conspiracy theorist, Stanley Kurtz is pushing a new crackpot smear against Barack falsely claiming he was a member of something called the New Party.

But the truth is Barack has been a member of only one political party, the Democratic Party. In all six primary campaigns of his career, Barack has has run as a Democrat. The New Party did support Barack once in 1996, but he was the only candidate on the ballot in his race and never solicited the endorsement.

This isn’t the first time Kurtz has ventured down this slippery slope — he has a history of telling these kinds of unsubstantiated tall tales. Kurtz is on the record with the sexist and intolerant claim that the national nursing shortage is the “fault of feminism.” And here’s what the Chicago Tribune had to say about this “partisan attack dog:”

WGN-AM 720 host Milt Rosenberg erred Wednesday night when he had partisan attack dog Stanley Kurtz as his only guest for a two-hour show….Rosenberg, who is himself quite the partisan, tut-tutted right along with Kurtz. It all disguised that Kurtz really had nothing new to add to the insinuations and innuendo in the guilt-by-association portion of the campaign against Obama in which he’s actively engaged.”

Barack Obama was the only major presidential candidate this year to completely reject contributions from the Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs that have dominated our politics for years. Instead, this campaign has been owned by the more than 3.1 million everyday Americans who have donated in small amounts.

The Obama campaign has complied fully with federal election law, including donor eligibility and contribution disclosure requirements. Any donation that has not met federal requirements, the campaign has fully-refunded.

But false and deceptive email rumors posing as a “column” by respected New York Times writer Maureen Dowd or as independent “research” by a concerned citizen are spreading cynical misinformation about Barack’s alleged foreign ties. These smear attacks use fake information and false claims of credibility to scare people who aren’t very familiar with Barack by making it sound like he’s doing something un-American or illegal.

The independent fact-check site Snopes.com determined that both the Maureen Dowd and research smears are definitively “false.” Snopes.com found that the research smear “combines a good deal of supposition and some elaborate conspiracy theory” to support its lies. And Snopes.com said of the fake Maureen Dowd smear, “aside from the article’s bogus attribution, the facts it posits about contributions to the Obama campaign are wrong.”

Some versions of these smears also take on the Obamas’ personal lives, making paranoid insinuations about how they paid for their educations (truth: student loans, just like millions of Americans) or where their friends were born (truth: Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran while her American-born parents were helping set up a hospital for the pro-American Iranian government at the time).

These smears are circulating all over the Internet. Fight back with the truth: make sure anyone who has seen this smear also sees this page.