Just the Facts. Part One

Posted on August 26, 2024 by bpriddy

A few weeks ago, we passed along CNN’s fact checking of the Trump-Biden presidential debate. It was a long entry and this one and the one we post on Wednesday combined will be even longer. But we are posting them because the personal discussions we have with others in the 70 days or so before the election are likely to rely on what was said during the political conventions. We believe it is irresponsible to take campaign rhetoric at face value.

We offer these entries because words are cheap on both sides, because political commercials are more manipulative than they are honest, and because we hope it can be a reference for you in stating our own statements honestly and questioning honestly the statements of others.

We recently talked with a friend whose views are different from ours and at the end we agreed that one of the great things about our country is that two friends can have the kind of disagreements we had without them disrupting the respectful relationship we have with each other. So we hope this material furthers intelligent but respectful discussion with you and your friends.

Because we relied on CNN’s Daniel Dale for the debate, we are going back to him and his staff for evaluations of the Republican National Convention today and the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.

The Washington Post and FactCheck.org (which is based at the Annenberg School for Communication Trust at the University of Pennsylvania), Politifact (part of the Poynter Institute which has a truth-o-meter than goes from zero to “Pants on Fire”), The Associated Press which has a webpage at Fact Check: Political & News Fact Check, are among other fact checkers not only for politics but in some cases for other issues.

First—because they went first—the Republicans:

Here are some of the most noteworthy falsehoods from night one of the RNC.

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

The Republican National Convention played a video in which former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. 20788998 58:01 Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” 20788998 57:44 And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a post-election November 2020 statement: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Sen. Blackburn claims Biden administration hired 85,000 new IRS agents

Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee claimed in her speech Monday that the Biden administration has hired 85,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents to “harass hardworking Americans.”

Facts First: This claim is false.

The Inflation Reduction Act – which Congress passed in 2022 without any Republican votes – provided an about $80 billion, 10-year investment to the IRS. The agency plans to hire tens of thousands of IRS employees with that money – but only some will be IRS agents who conduct audits and investigations. Many people will be hired for non-agent roles, such as customer service representatives. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

The 85,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury Department report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees – not solely enforcement agents – over the course of a decade with a nearly $80 billion investment.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Sen. Katie Britt on Americans working two jobs

Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama suggested in her speech on Monday that during President Joe Biden’s term, Americans are having to take on two jobs to deal with the cost of living.

“With President Trump, the tough choice was which job offer to accept, now it’s which second job to take just to pay the bills,” she said.

Facts First: The number of workers who hold multiple jobs as a percentage of total employment has never gone above the highest level under Trump, according to Labor Department data.

While it’s true that the annual inflation rate reached its highest level in more than four decades under Biden (in June 2022, though it has since declined), Americans aren’t necessarily taking on two jobs more than usual to deal with it. In fact, the number of Americans holding multiple jobs as a share of all employed workers was below levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic throughout 2021 and 2022. It has increased over the past several months, reaching 5.2% in June. The share of workers with multiple jobs hasn’t gone above 5.3% since the Great Recession.

From CNN’s Bryan Mena

North Carolina gubernatorial candidate’s economic claims

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, now running for governor, made a series of economic claims in his speech. One about the Biden era was misleading, while another about the Trump era touted pre-pandemic statistics without acknowledging that when Trump left office the economy was in much worse shape.

Robinson said that under Biden’s administration, “grocery prices have skyrocketed, and gas has nearly doubled.”

Facts First: It is true that grocery prices have jumped by over 20% since Biden was sworn in, but gas prices aren’t double what they were when he took office.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to AAA. When Biden was inaugurated, the national average was $2.39.

Robinson also claimed that while Trump was president, unemployment was “at a historic low.” That was certainly true prior to the pandemic. For instance, in February 2020, the nation’s unemployment rate was at 3.5%, the lowest since the late 1960s.
By comparison, the average monthly unemployment rate over the past decade was 4.8%.
But when Trump left office, it was at 6.4%, far from historic lows.

From CNN’s Elisabeth Buchwald

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s misleading claim about Biden-era job growth

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia claimed of Democrats: “They claim that our economy is thriving, yet hundreds of thousands of American-born workers lost their jobs these past few years.”

Facts First: This is misleading at best. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that the number of American-born workers with jobs has grown significantly during President Joe Biden’s administration. About 130.9 million American-born workers were employed in June, an increase of nearly 4.7 million since June 2021, shortly after Biden took office. (This data is not seasonally adjusted, so we have to look at the same month in each year for an accurate comparison. In January 2021, the month Biden was sworn in, about 123 million American-born workers were employed.)

There is always churn in the labor market, so it’s certainly possible that hundreds of thousands of individual American-born workers lost their jobs during this period – but contrary to Greene’s insinuation, there have been far greater gains than losses under Biden for American-born workers as a group.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Tami Luhby

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Transgender Day of Visibility

Greene said while attacking Democrats in her convention speech that “the establishment in Washington” held Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter this year.

“They promised normalcy and gave us Transgender Visibility Day on Easter Sunday,” the Georgia Republican said.

Facts first: This claim needs context. Transgender Day of Visibility has been held annually on March 31 since it was started in 2009 as a day of awareness to celebrate the successes of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the first day of spring and can change year to year. The holiday happened to fall on March 31 in 2024.

Responding to Republicans criticizing President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in an April 1 briefing said she was “surprised by the misinformation” surrounding Easter and Transgender Day of Visibility falling on the same day.

“Every year, for the past several years, on March 31, Transgender Day of Visibility is marked. And as we know — for folks who understand the calendar and how it works, Easter falls on different Sundays every year. And this year, it happened to coincide with Transgender Visibility Day. And so, that is the simple fact,” she said.

From CNN’s Jack Forrest

RNC video falsely claims Trump signed largest tax cuts ever

A video played at the Republican National Convention featured a narrator making the claim that Trump “gave us the largest tax cuts in history.”

Facts First: This is false. Analyses have found that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

In a report released in June, the federal government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office looked at the size of past tax cuts enacted between 1981 and 2023. It found that two other tax cut bills have been bigger – former President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 package and legislation signed by former President Barack Obama that extended earlier tax cuts enacted during former President George W. Bush’s administration.

The CBO measured the sizes of tax cuts by looking at the revenue effects of the bills as a percentage of gross domestic product – in other words, how much federal revenue the bill cuts as a portion of the economy – over five years. Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and Obama’s 2012 tax cut extension were 3.5% and 1.7% of GDP, respectively.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit, found in 2017 that the framework for the Trump tax cuts would be the fourth largest since 1940 in inflation-adjusted dollars and the eighth largest since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Republican chair falsely claims Middle East was ‘at peace’ four years ago

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said in his speech on Monday: “Four years ago, Europe and the Middle East were at peace.”

Facts First: Whatley’s claim is false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords that Trump’s administration helped to negotiate, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East four years ago in mid-2020 and when Trump left office in early 2021.

The list notably included the civil war in Yemen; the civil war in Syria; and the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Millercalled “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.” Also, the US, its allies and civilians continued to be attacked in an unstable Iraq.

“It’s a highly inaccurate statement,” Miller, who worked on Mideast peace negotiations while in government and is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said last fall, when Trump himself made a similar claim about having achieved peace in the Middle East.

Dana El Kurd, senior nonresident fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC think tank, also called that claim “false” when Trump made it. She said in a November email: “The Abraham Accords did not achieve peace in the Middle East. In fact, violence escalated in Israel-Palestine in the aftermath of the Accords (using any metric you can think of – death tolls, settlement violence, etc).”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video attacks Biden with two-year-old gas price figure

The Republican National Convention featured a video attacking Biden over the price of gas. But the video misleadingly deployed out-of-date figures as if they were current.

A narrator claimed: “When President Trump left office, gas cost only $2.20. Under Biden and Harris, gas skyrocketed to the highest price in history, over five bucks a gallon.” Later in the video, a young man said, “Within my first year of driving, I’m having to deal with an average of $5.03 across the nation,” and a woman said, “It’s impossible to pay $5.03. We need to care about our people better than that.”

Facts First: These claims about Biden-era gas prices are two years out of date. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline was about $3.52 on Monday, according to the AAA. The national average did, under Biden, hit a record high of more than $5 per gallon – about $5.02, according to AAA data – but that happened in June 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a global spike in oil prices. The RNC videos offered no indication that the national average has since fallen substantially.

Also, the national average on the day Trump left office in January 2021 was about $2.39 per gallon, not $2.20, though it was lower than $2.20 in some states.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video doesn’t mention Trump was president during one of the years Americans’ incomes dropped

A video played during the Republican National Convention, which attacked Biden’s handling of the economy, featured a narrator saying, “The Wall Street Journal has reported today that Americans’ incomes have gone down three straight years.”

Facts First: This needs context. The RNC video left out an inconvenient fact from the Wall Street Journal report that was published in 2023: one of the three straight years in which inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline, but the ad failed to explain that not all of the three years were under Biden.

Real median household income fell from $78,250 in 2019 to $76,660 in 2020 (all under Trump), then edged down to $76,330 in 2021 (mostly under Biden) and fell more substantially to $74,580 in 2022 (all under Biden). Figures for 2023 and 2024-to-date are not available.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video cites outdated inflation figure

Attacking Biden’s handling of the economy, the Republican National Convention featured a video in which a narrator said, “America has reached the highest inflation in 40 years.”

Facts First: This claim is two years out of date. The year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was indeed the highest since late 1981, between 40 and 41 years prior. But inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3.0% – a rate that, the Biden presidency aside, was exceeded as recently as 2011.

SECOND NIGHT;

Speakers at the second night of the Republican National Convention made many false and misleading claims throughout the night which focused heavily on immigration and crime.

Here is a list of fact checks from CNN’s Facts First team.

Speaker Mike Johnson makes false claim about crime under Biden

After criticizing President Joe Biden as weak, House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed in his Tuesday speech at the Republican National Convention that Democrats’ policies have brought communities “dramatic increases” in “violence, crime and drugs.”

Similarly, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik referred to “Biden’s violent crime crisis,” and a video played near the beginning of the Tuesday evening proceedings featured a narrator saying, “It’s not just big cities. Rising crime is a problem everywhere.”

Facts First: Johnson’s claims about dramatic increases in violence and crime are false, as is the convention video’s claim that there is a problem “everywhere” with “rising crime.” Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Stefanik’s claim of a “violent crime crisis” under Biden is subjective, but she certainly did not acknowledge that the current numbers under Biden are superior to final Trump-era numbers.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall violent crime.

There are limitations to the FBI-published data, which comes from local law enforcement – the numbers are preliminary, not all communities submitted data, and the submitted data usually has some initial errors – so these statistics may not precisely capture the size of the recent declines in crime. But these statistics and other data sources make it clear crime has indeed declined to some extent nationally, though not everywhere.

Crime data expert Jeff Asher, co-founder of the firm AH Datalytics, said that if the final 2023 figures show a decline in murder of at least 10% from 2022, this would be the fastest US decline “ever recorded.” And he noted that both the preliminary FBI-published data from the first quarter of 2024 and also “crime data collected from several independent sources point to an even larger decline in property and violent crime, including a substantially larger drop in murder, so far this year compared to 2023, though there is still time left in the year for those trends to change.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Scalise claims Biden has ‘erode’ American ‘energy dominance’

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise claimed Tuesday in his Republican National Convention speech that the Biden administration has “eroded the American energy dominance that President Trump delivered.” He also claimed that Democrats are waging an “assault on American energy.”

Facts First: Scalise’s claims are misleading. The US under President Joe Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has. The world record was set by the US in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, averaging about 12.9 million barrels per day – exceeding the Trump-era record, an average of about 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. US production of dry natural gas also hit a new high in 2023. So did US crude oil exports.

CNN’s Matt Egan reported in December that the US was exporting the same amount of crude oil, refined products and natural gas liquids as Saudi Arabia or Russia were producing, according to S&P Global Commodity Insights.

None of this is to say that Biden is the reason that domestic oil production has increased; market factors are the key driver of companies’ investment and production decisions, and the Energy Information Administration has credited technological improvements in fracking and horizontal drilling technology that have made oil wells more productive. Egan reported in August: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”

Still, despite Biden’s often-critical rhetoric about fossil fuel companies, some policy moves to get tougher on those companies and his major investments in initiatives to fight climate change, he certainly has not come close to stopping fossil fuel production as Trump has claimed.

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Biden has also approved some significant and controversial fossil fuel projects, including the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska and the Mountain Valley gas pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Scalise on migrants coming to the US

Scalise said Tuesday that migrants are arriving in the US after having been deliberately freed from prison.

“On the border, Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world. Prisons are being emptied,” said Scalise, a Louisiana Republican.

Facts first: There is no evidence for Scalise’s claim that “prisons of being emptied” so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants.

“I do a daily news search to see what’s going on in prisons around the world and have seen absolutely no evidence that any country is emptying its prisons and sending them all to the US,” said Helen Fair, who is co-author of the World Prison Population List, which tracks the global prison population, and a research fellow at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

Trump, now the Republican presidential nominee, has repeatedly made such claims in his own speeches and interviews. But Trump has never provided any proof for the claim.

Trump’s campaign has provided CNN with only a vague 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents about Venezuela freeing violent prisoners who had then joined migrant caravans.

But this supposed claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated, and experts have told CNN, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org that they know of no proof of any such thing having happened.

The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Lara Trump’s claims about unemployment records under Trump

Lara Trump, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee and the former president’s daughter-in-law, hailed the state of the country during the Trump administration. Among other things, she said there were “record low unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans and women.”

Facts First: These claims need context. Lara Trump didn’t mention that the Trump-era record lows for African American unemployment, Hispanic Americans unemployment and women’s unemployment were all beaten or matched during President Joe Biden’s presidency, though the Trump-era record for Asian American unemployment still stands.

The current record low for the Black or African American unemployment rate, 4.8%, was set under Biden in April 2023.
That beat the Trump-era low that was a record at the time, 5.3% in August 2019 and September 2019. (A cautionary note: This official data series goes back only to 1972.)

The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate hit 3.9% under Biden in September 2022, tying the record low first set in 2019 under Trump.

The unemployment rate among women hit 3.4% under Trump in September 2019 and October 2019, the lowest since the 1950s, but it fell to 3.3% under Biden in January 2023.

The record set under Trump for Asian American unemployment, 2% in June 2019, has not been matched under Biden. The lowest Biden-era rate was 2.3% in July 2023.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Stefanik claims that Biden presidency has led to the highest inflation of her lifetime

Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York claimed in her Republican National Convention speech Tuesday that Biden’s presidency has led to the “highest rate of inflation” in her lifetime.

Facts First: This claim is out of date.

While the year-over-year inflation rate in June 2022, about 9.1%, was the highest since late 1981, inflation has declined sharply since that Biden-era peak, and the most recent available rate, for June 2024, was about 3%. That rate was exceeded as recently as 2011.
Stefanik was born in 1984.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Wisconsin Senate candidate exaggerates the numbers of fentanyl deaths

Eric Hovde, the Republican running for Senate in Wisconsin, claimed in his RNC speech Tuesday that the Biden administration “emboldened drug cartels to flood our streets with fentanyl killing over 100,000 Americans every year” by opening the country’s southern border and allowing “criminals and terrorists to enter the country.”

Facts First: It’s a significant exaggeration that fentanyl kills more than 100,000 Americans every year due to the country’s “open” borders. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2023, including fentanyl, was approximately 75,000, according to estimated and provisional data.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in May that roughly 107,500 people in the US died from a drug overdose, but that is the total number of people who died from an overdose from any kind of drug.

Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, were involved in the majority of those fatalities, making up nearly 70% of overdose deaths in 2023, but they did not account for all of them.

In fact, compared with 2022, there were around 1,500 fewer overdose deaths involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids in 2023. The estimated number of deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants such as methamphetamines increased in 2023.

Specifically, in 2023, there were 74,702 deaths from synthetic opioids, and most of those deaths were from fentanyl. By comparison, in 2022 the estimated number was 76,226, according to the CDC.

It is also worth noting that fentanyl is largely smuggled by US citizens through legal ports of entry, rather than by migrants sneaking into the country. Contrary to frequent claims by Republicans, the border is not “open”; border officers have seized an increasing amount of illicit fentanyl, numbering in the hundreds of millions of pills, under Biden.

From CNN’s Jen Christensen

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

For the second consecutive night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Kari Lake on her opponent’s record about voting laws

Kari Lake said Tuesday that Democratic Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, her likely opponent in the state’s US Senate race this fall, voted last week to let undocumented immigrants “illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

“These guys are full, they’re full of bad ideas,” Lake said in her speech. “Just last week Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”

Fact First: This claim is false.

The House did not vote on whether to allow noncitizens to vote. The chamber passed a bill on July 10 that would require documentary proof of US citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Gallego voted against the legislation, which is not expected to be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and experts say it rarely occurs. When people register to vote, they must provide a driver’s license or Social Security number, and their identity is checked against existing databases. Voters are required to swear under penalty of perjury that they are a US citizen. Noncitizens who vote illegally can face imprisonment or deportation.

Gallego said in a statement that he opposed the bill because its “only purpose is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of Arizonans, and I will not vote to take away the rights of Arizonans to stop something that is already illegal.”

“Of course, only U.S. citizens should vote,” said Gallego. “But this bill isn’t about that, it’s about making it harder for Arizonans to vote, including married women, servicemembers, Native Arizonans, seniors, and people with disabilities.”

From CNN’s Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Perry Johnson’s incorrect claim about median family income

Perry Johnson, a Michigan business owner who previously ran for governor and president, said Tuesday that income rose consistently under Trump.

“Under Trump, family income went up every year. That is a fact,” Johnson told the crowd.

Facts first: Johnson is incorrect. Median family income fell in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic in both inflation-adjusted and non-adjusted terms.

Typical family income grew by several thousand dollars during each of Trump’s first three years in office, before adjusting for inflation. But it fell by $1,660 in 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy.

After factoring in inflation, typical family income fell by nearly $2,900 in 2020, after rising in each of the first three years of Trump’s administration.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

THIRD NIGHT:

Night three of the Republican National Convention included former President Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, and other speakers who made false and misleading claims throughout the night.

Here is a list of fact checks from CNN’s Facts First team.

Vance’s misleading claim about Trump and the invasion of Iraq

Former President Donald Trump’s choice for vice president, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, insinuated in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday that Trump had opposed the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.

Vance said that “when I was a senior in high school, that same Joe Biden supported the disastrous invasion of Iraq.” After mentioning other past Biden positions as well, Vance said, “Somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong. President Trump knew, even then, that we needed leaders who would put America first.”

Facts First: Vance’s claim is misleading. In reality, Trump did not publicly express opposition to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq before it occurred. When radio host Howard Stern asked Trump in September 2002 whether he is “for invading Iraq,” Trump responded, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

In his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” Trump argued a military strike on Iraq might be necessary. And Trump did not express a firm opinion about the looming war in a Fox interview in January 2003, saying that “either you attack or don’t attack” and that then-President George W. Bush “has either got to do something or not do something, perhaps.”

Trump began criticizing the war in 2003, after the invasion, and also said that year that American troops should not be withdrawn from Iraq.
He emerged as an explicit opponent of the war in 2004, the year before Biden did.

But Vance suggested Trump had been right on the invasion itself while Biden got it wrong, and there’s no basis for the claim that they were on opposing sides of the issue.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Kimberly Guilfoyle claims that ‘Trump handed Biden a booming economy’

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and former Fox News host, slammed Biden for his handling of the economy in her speech on the third night of the Republican National Convention.

“President Trump handed Biden a booming economy and a strong nation. All Joe had to do was leave it alone and take a nap,” she said Wednesday.

Facts First: Guilfoyle’s comments are misleading. While the economy did well during the first three years of the Trump administration, it was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. While it had recovered somewhat by the end of 2020, there were still multiple weak points heading into 2021, when Biden took office.

The US economy grew at an annualized and seasonally adjusted rate of 4% in the fourth quarter of 2020. That would usually be a great rate, but it didn’t make up for a weak first quarter and terrible second quarter spurred by the pandemic. For all of 2020, the GDP fell 3.5% from the prior year, the worst decline since 1946.

Also, disposable incomes fell by 9.5% on an annualized basis in the fourth quarter of 2020, and the unemployment rate was 6.7% in December of that year. Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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The US economy shed 140,000 jobs that month — a far worse outcome than economists predicted at the time.

Covid-19 infections had increased that month, prompting some states to take additional containment measures.

Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer jobs than when he entered, largely because of the pandemic.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

RNC video makes outdated claim about US wages

A video that played before Vance’s speech hit Biden over his handling of the economy.

“Under Biden, wages are going down while prices skyrocket,” the video said.

Facts first: The claim in the video is outdated. While inflation outpaced wages during the first half of the Biden administration, that reversed in the middle of last year.

Inflation rose sharply during the early years of the Biden administration but has since slowed to an annual rate of 3% in June. In fact, prices fell in June for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Meanwhile, real average hourly earnings – which takes inflation into account – began increasing in mid-2023. They rose 0.8% on a seasonally adjusted basis, from June 2023 to June 2024, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

RNC chairman’s false claim about the 2020 economy

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley said in his opening remarks at the party convention on Wednesday: “Our economy is not nearly as strong as it was four years ago.”

Facts First: This is false.
Four years ago, in mid-2020, the US economy was in dire straits because of the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, the June 2020 unemployment rate was 11%, well over double the June 2024 rate of 4.1%. In late July 2020, the federal government announced that the US economy had just experienced its worst contraction on record – shrinking by an annual rate of 32.9% in the quarter running from April 2020 through June 2020.

We give politicians wide latitude to express opinions, and many Trump supporters have argued that the pre-pandemic economy under former Trump, in 2019 and prior, was stronger than the current Biden-era economy. That’s a matter of subjective debate. But it’s plainly inaccurate that the mid-2020 economy was superior to the current economy.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Newt Gingrich on the war in Afghanistan under Trump

Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich claimed that “President Trump orchestrated an orderly end to the Afghanistan war with no American killed in nearly two years.”

Facts first: Both of these claims are false.

Although Trump oversaw a deal with the Taliban aimed at the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the war did not end under his presidency. The last US troops left Afghanistan in August 2021 under the Biden administration.

Moreover, there is no period of “nearly two years” under Trump’s presidency where no American service member was killed. During his four years in office, there were 45 US service member hostile deaths, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. The longest stretch without combat deaths was at the end of his presidency, from March 2020 until he left office in January 2021 – less than a year.

From CNN’s Jennifer Hansler

Former Trump intel chief misleadingly says ‘Taliban is back’

Richard Grenell, who served as the acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020, said Wednesday night that under President Joe Biden “the Taliban is back.”

“[A]fter four years of Joe Biden, wars are back, the Taliban is back and members of ISIS have slipped through America’s broken southern border,” Grenell said.

Facts first: The claim that the “Taliban is back” is misleading, as it insinuates the Taliban ever left.

While it’s true that the Taliban returned to power after the United States’ 2021 withdrawal, the Taliban remained present in Afghanistan throughout Trump’s time in office. The US, under the Trump administration, and the Taliban signed a historic agreement in 2020 that set into motion the US’ withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

Officials within the Trump administration also met with Taliban representatives “repeatedly” in Doha for nearly a year, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a 2019 report.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Peter Navarro’s false claims about his prosecution for contempt of Congress

The same day he got out of prison after serving his sentence for contempt of Congress, former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro claimed that the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol demanded he break the law.

“They demanded that I break the law because they have no respect for it. I refused,” Navarro told the audience at the Republic National Convention Wednesday, adding that the committee wanted him to betray Trump.

Navarro also claimed that special counsel Jack Smith “indicted and prosecuted me.”

Facts first: These assertions are both false. While Navarro has long claimed that the information subpoenaed by the committee was protected by executive privilege, the judge presiding over his case found evidence did not show that Trump had formally asserted the privilege. And Smith did not prosecute Navarro; the US attorney in Washington, DC, did.

In a ruling last summer, prior to his trial where a jury convicted Navarro of being in contempt of Congress, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Navarro could not argue that Trump asserted executive privilege to shield him from the congressional subpoena.

Mehta concluded that either Trump himself or someone authorized to assert privilege or immunity on his behalf would have had to personally invoke the privilege for it to be validly asserted. The judge said Navarro had not put forward adequate evidence to show such an assertion when he was subpoenaed for testimony and documents by the House committee in February 2022.

A jury in Washington, DC, found that Navarro broke the law in refusing to comply with Congress, not the other way around as the former adviser suggested.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Florida Republican’s false claim about electric tanks

Florida Rep. Mike Waltz said Wednesday that Biden is “focused on building electric tanks.”

“What do we have today with President Biden? What’s he focused on? … here’s my favorite, he’s focused on building electric tanks. Has anyone seen any charging stations in the Middle East for Biden’s electric tanks?”

Facts first: The claim that Biden is focused on building electric tanks is false.

The Army released a climate strategy in 2022 that called for a move toward various kinds of electric vehicles, including “fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050,” but that would not include tanks. And, regardless, a strategy is not a mandate.

An engineer with the RAND Corporation told FactCheck.org of similar claims made by Trump regarding electric tanks in the military: “While it may be true that an electric tank would have limited range, the Army is not planning on fielding or deploying an electric tank, though there have been prototypes of hybrid tanks.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Florida lawmaker’s claim about extremism training in the military

Florida Rep. Brian Mast claimed at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday that the Biden administration has distracted the military “with millions of hours of so-called extremism training.”

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have once again weakened our armed forces and …
distracted our troops with millions of hours of so-called extremism training,” Mast said.

Facts first: The claim that the US military has “millions of hours” of extremism training is false.

While there has been training in the military on extremism, it is not millions of hours’ worth. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered units in 2021 to hold a one-day “stand down” to discuss extremism in the military. The undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness said in a 2022 memo that “discussions about extremist activity” would be included in “periodic training.”

But the Biden administration has also shown an unwillingness to require more training on extremism in the military.

In 2021, the White House said that while the administration “shares the goal of preventing prohibited extremist activities and holding offenders accountable,” it would not support the establishment of an Office of Countering Extremism in the Pentagon “because it would impose onerous and overly specific training.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Burgum claims Biden has waged a ‘war on energy’

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum claimed Wednesday night as he addressed the Republican National Convention that Biden has waged a “war on energy.”

Facts First: This claim needs context. Biden has stressed the importance of renewable energy during his administration, but the US under Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has.

The world record was set by the US in 2023, according to the federal Energy Information Administration, averaging about 12.9 million barrels per day – exceeding the Trump-era record, an average of about 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. US production of dry natural gas also hit a new high in 2023. So did US crude oil exports.

Egan reported in August: “The American Petroleum Institute, an oil trade group that has been critical of the Biden administration’s regulatory efforts, noted that approved federal permits and new federal acres leased have both fallen sharply under Biden.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Ronny Jackson’s false claim of ‘record-high inflation’

Rep. Ronny Jackson of Texas claimed in his Republican National Convention speech on Wednesday that there has been “record-high inflation” under the Biden administration.

Facts First: This is false. The record for US inflation, set in 1920, is 23.7%; the Biden-era peak was 9.1% in June 2022. Jackson could fairly say there was a four-decade high under Biden – that June 2022 figure was the highest since late 1981 – but there was nothing close to a new record.

In addition, Jackson didn’t mention that inflation has fallen sharply since the Biden-era peak two years ago. The current inflation rate, for June 2024, is 3%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Rep. Mike Waltz’s false claim about spy balloons

Republican Rep. Mike Waltz said Wednesday that there were no spy balloon incidents during the Trump administration, like the Chinese spy balloon that transited over the continental US in 2023 before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.

“We had a president who defeated ISIS, broke Iran, stood with Israel, always stood with our allies, made China pay. You didn’t see any spy balloons under President Trump, did you?” Waltz said.

Facts first: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.

Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

RNC chairman’s false claim about Russia’s nuclear missiles near Cuba

Whatley claimed in his opening speech on Wednesday evening that Russia has “parked a nuclear missile capable boat” in Cuba.

“Where are we today? Russia has invaded Ukraine,” he said. “They’ve parked a nuclear missile capable boat 90 miles off our shore in Havana, Cuba.”

Facts first: This claim about the status of a Russian boat is false. While Russia did have a nuclear-powered submarine visiting Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy vessels, all of the vessels – including the submarine – have since left.

A group of four Russian Navy vessels arrived in Cuba on June 12 as part of what Pentagon and State Department officials stressed is a routine activity and noted that Cuba has hosted Russian ships every year between 2013 and 2020. A Pentagon spokesperson, Maj. Charlie Dietz, said in June that “given Russia’s long history of Cuban port calls, these are considered routine naval visits, especially in the context of increased US support to Ukraine and NATO exercises.”

The nuclear-powered submarine, the Kazan, was the first of the vessels to leave Havana on June 17.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

RNC video falsely claims there was peace in the Middle East under Trump

A video played early in the Republican National Convention proceedings on Wednesday night claimed that the “strength” of Trump kept “the Middle East at peace.” Whatley had similarly claimed in his convention speech on Monday that the Middle East was “at peace” four years ago under Trump.

Facts First: The claim that there was peace in the Middle East under Trump is false. Whatever the merits of the Abraham Accords that Trump’s administration helped to negotiate, in which Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel (Morocco and Sudan followed), there was still lots of unresolved armed conflict around the Middle East when Trump left office in early 2021.

The list notably included the civil war in Yemen; the civil war in Syria; and the conflicts between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, between Israel and Hezbollah on its border with Lebanon, between Israel and Syria, and what former State Department official Aaron David Miller called “the war between the wars between Israel and Iran on air, land and sea.” Also, the US, its allies and civilians continued to be attacked in an unstable Iraq.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

RNC video cites right-wing think tank without mentioning it was doing so

A video played at the beginning of Republican National Convention proceedings on Wednesday evening attacked Biden’s handling of foreign policy – and featured a narrator saying, “The Defense News reports today that the US military is in decline and threats from China are formidable.”

Facts First: This claim is misleading. Defense News, an independent publication covering national security, did not itself assert that the US military is in decline. Rather, the publication reported that the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank had made that assertion.

A Defense News article in October 2022 was headlined, “US military in decline, threats from China ‘formidable,’ report says.” The article explained that these assertions came from “a new report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that each year analyzes the strength of the armed forces and the threats to America.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

FOURTH NIGHT:

Former President Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday with the most dishonest speech of the four-day Republican National Convention, making more than 20 false claims by CNN’s count.

Many of the false claims were ones Trump has made before, some of them for years. They spanned a wide variety of topics, including the economy, immigration, crime, foreign policy and elections. Some of them were wild lies, others smaller exaggerations. Some were in his prepared text (like the absurd claim that he left the Biden administration a world at peace), while he ad-libbed others (such as his usual lies that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and that the US is experiencing the worst inflation it has ever had).

Below is a fact check of some of Trump’s false or misleading remarks, plus a fact check of claims made by other Thursday convention speakers.

Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Former President Donald Trump claimed that there is record inflation under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. The current inflation rate, 3% in June 2024, is nowhere near the all-time record of 23.7%, set in 1920.

Trump could fairly say that the inflation rate hit a 40-year high in June 2022, when it was 9.1%, but it has since plummeted.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s misleading claim about North Korean missile launches during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that he “got along with” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and “we stopped the missile launches from North Korea.”

“But, no, I got along with him,” Trump said, “and we stopped the missile launches from North Korea. Now North Korea is acting up again.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that he “stopped the missile launches” from North Korea is misleading. While missile launches did pause from North Korea for a period of time during his administration, they started up again before he left office.

A May 2019 launch of what was assessed to be a short-range ballistic missile was North Korea’s first since 2017, which was seen as a sign of growing frustration from Kim on the state of talks with the US. North Korea later launched two more missiles in July 2019, a month after Trump’s high-profile meeting with Kim in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. North Korea conducted four missile tests in 2020.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on his claims of defeating ISIS in “couple of months”

Former President Donald Trump claimed in his RNC speech that “we defeated 100% of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, something that was going to take five years. … We did it in a matter of a couple of months.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim of having defeated ISIS in “a couple of months” isn’t true; the ISIS “caliphate” was declared fully liberated more than two years into Trump’s presidency, in 2019.

Even if Trump was starting the clock at the time of his visit to Iraq in late December 2018, as he has suggested in past remarks, the liberation was proclaimed more than two and a half months later. In addition, Trump gave himself far too much credit for the defeat of the caliphate, as he has before, when he said he defeated the terror group with no caveats or credit to anyone else. Kurdish forces did much of the ground fighting, and there was major progress against the caliphate under President Barack Obama in 2015 and 2016.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.

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IHS Markit, an information company that studied the changing size of the caliphate, reported two days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration that the caliphate shrunk by 23% in 2016 after shrinking by 14% in 2015. “The Islamic State suffered unprecedented territorial losses in 2016, including key areas vital for the group’s governance project,” an analyst there said in a statement at the time.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Donald Trump’s misleading claim that federal judge ruled case against him was ‘unconstitutional’

Donald Trump said Thursday that the Florida federal judge who was overseeing the classified documents case dismissed the criminal charges against the former president, finding “that the prosecutor and the fake documents case against me were totally unconstitutional.”

Facts first: Trump’s claim is misleading. District Judge Aileen Cannon wrote in her ruling that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith, who was prosecuting the case, violated the Constitution. But Cannon specifically did not comment on the validity of the charges Trump was facing, or whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper.

In a 93-page ruling Monday, Cannon said Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution. Cannon said that Smith’s position as special counsel “effectively usurps” Congress’ “important legislative authority,” because Congress should have the authority – not the head of the Justice Department – to appoint such an official.

Cannon also said that Smith’s office was being funded improperly.

But Cannon also specifically noted that she was not deciding any “other legal rights or claims” brought by Trump or his co-defendants in the case.

The judge also said that the Justice Department could potentially revive the case by funding the special counsel through different means. Prosecutors from outside the special counsel’s office could also refile the charges.

From CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz

Trump on the impact of immigration on Medicare and Social Security

During his Republican National Convention speech, former President Donald Trump again said that Democrats are harming Social Security and Medicare by letting migrants into the US.

“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare because all of these people by the millions are coming in – they’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare,” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump is wrong. In fact, the opposite is true, particularly in the near term, multiple experts say. Many undocumented immigrants work, which means they pay much-needed payroll taxes, and this bolsters the Social Security and Medicare trust funds and extends their solvency. Immigrants who are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits.

The Social Security Administration looked at the effects of unauthorized immigration on the Social Security trust funds. It found that in 2010, earnings by unauthorized workers contributed roughly $12 billion on net to the entitlement program’s cash flow. The agency has not updated the analysis since, but this year’s Social Security trustees report noted that increasing average annual total net immigration by 100,000 persons improves the entitlement program’s solvency.

“We estimate that future years will experience a continuation of this positive impact on the trust funds,” said the report on unauthorized immigration.

Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011, extending the life of the trust fund by a year, according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Immigrants tend to be younger and employed, which increases the number of workers paying into the system,” said Gary Engelhardt, a Syracuse University economics professor. “Also, they have more children, which helps boost the future workforce that will pay payroll taxes.”

“Immigrants are good for Social Security,” he said.

However, undocumented immigrants who gain legal status that includes eligibility for future Social Security and Medicare benefits could ultimately be a drain to the system, according to Jason Richwine, a resident scholar at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower immigration.

“Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs,” Richwine wrote in a report last year.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump on trade deal with China

Former President Donald Trump claimed that he struck a trade deal with China, requiring the country to purchase $50 billion worth of American products. “They buy $50 billion worth,” he said at the Republican National Convention Thursday.

Facts First: The claim that China bought $50 billion worth of American product as a result of a trade deal is false.

Trump is referring to what is known as the Phase One deal he struck with Beijing in December 2019.

While the deal required China to buy $50 billion worth of American agricultural products by the end of 2021 – Beijing did not live up to its commitment.

US agricultural exports to China recovered from the trade war but did not reach the levels in the Phase One commitments, according to a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Donald Trump exaggerates how much higher gas prices are right now

Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump described gas prices inaccurately during his keynote speech at the Republican National Convention. He said that “gas prices are up 60%.”

Facts First: The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline nationwide is $3.51 as of Thursday, according to AAA. That’s up about 47% from the day President Joe Biden was inaugurated, when the average was $2.39, not 60% higher as Trump claimed.

Although the United States has a strategic gasoline reserve, which can be tapped by the White House to ease upward pressure on prices, as Biden did in May, gas prices are still mostly determined by market forces, such as global petroleum production and consumer demand, not solely by the decisions of a sitting US president.

From CNN’s Bryan Mena

Trump claims government hired 88,000 IRS agents

Former President Donald Trump, while recounting a conversation he had with a waitress worried about the taxes on her tips, claimed that the government recently hired 88,000 IRS agents to audit individuals.

Facts First: This claim is false.

The 88,000 figure comes from a 2021 Treasury Department report that estimated the IRS could hire 86,852 full-time employees – not solely enforcement agents – over the course of a decade with a nearly $80 billion investment.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

Trump on Biden increasing Americans’ taxes by four times

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim that President Joe Biden wants to hike people’s taxes by four times.

“This is the only administration that said, ‘We’re gonna raise your taxes by four times what you’re paying now,’” Trump said Thursday in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024.

Biden has not proposed quadrupling Americans’ taxes, and there has never been any indication that he is seeking to do so. The nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center think tank, which analyzed Biden’s never-implemented budget proposals for fiscal 2024, found this: “His plan would raise average after-tax incomes for low-income households in 2024, leave them effectively unchanged for middle-income households, and lower after-tax incomes significantly for the highest-income taxpayers.”

The Tax Policy Center found that Biden’s proposal would, on average, have raised taxes by about $2,300 – but that’s about a 2.3% decline in after-tax income, not the massive reduction Trump is suggesting Biden wants. And critically, Tax Policy Center senior fellow Howard Gleckman noted to CNN in May that 95% of the tax hike would have been covered by the highest-income 5% of households.

The very biggest burden under the Biden plan would have been carried by the very richest households; the Tax Policy Center found that households in the top 0.1% would have seen their after-tax incomes decline by more than 20%. That’s “a lot,” Gleckman noted, but it’s still nowhere near the quadrupling Trump claims Biden is looking for. And again, even this increase would have been only for a tiny subset of the population. Biden has promised not to raise taxes by even a cent for anyone making under $400,000 per year.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s claim on the situation before the ‘Right to Try’ law

Former President Donald Trump touted the “Right to Try” law he signed in 2018 in his convention speech Thursday, which gave terminally ill patients easier access to experimental medications that haven’t yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Before the measure was passed, Trump claimed, terminally ill patients in the United States would have to go to foreign countries to seek experimental treatments or go home to die if they couldn’t afford it.

“Sounds simple, but it’s not, and I got them to agree that somebody that needs it will – instead of going to Asia or Europe or some place – or if you have no money, going home and dying,” he said.

Facts First: This is misleading. It is not true that terminally ill patients would simply have to go home and die without any access to experimental medications or would have to go to foreign countries seeking such treatments until Trump signed the Right to Try. Prior to the law, patients had to ask the federal government for permission to access experimental medications – but the government almost always said yes.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as Trump’s FDA commissioner, told Congress in 2017 that the FDA had approved 99% of patient requests under its own “expanded access” program.

‘“Emergency requests for individual patients are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergency requests are generally processed within a few days,” Gottlieb testified.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Trump’s claim about Russian warships near Cuba

Former President Donald claimed in his RNC speech on Wednesday evening that “Russian warships and nuclear submarines are operating 60 miles off our coasts in Cuba. … The press refuses to write about it.”

Facts First: Trump’s present-tense claim that Russian warships and nuclear submarines “are” operating close to the United States is misleading. While Russia did have a nuclear-powered submarine visiting Cuba in June along with other Russian Navy vessels, all of the vessels – including the submarine – have since left.

The vessels left Havana on June 17.

It is also not true that media organizations “don’t want to talk about it.” CNN, along with most other major news outlets, reported on the Russian ships’ positioning.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump on military equipment left in Afghanistan

Former President Donald Trump repeated his claim, which he has made in speech after speech, that the US left $85 billion worth of military equipment to the Taliban when Biden pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in 2021.

Trump said, “And we also left $85 billion dollars’ worth of military equipment.”

Facts First: Trump’s $85 billion figure is false. While a significant quantity of military equipment that had been provided by the US to Afghan forces was indeed abandoned to the Taliban upon the US withdrawal, the Defense Department has estimated that this equipment had been worth about $7.1 billion – a chunk of the roughly $18.6 billion worth of equipment provided to Afghan forces between 2005 and 2021. And some of the equipment left behind was rendered inoperable before US forces withdrew.

As other fact-checkers have previously explained, the “$85 billion” is a rounded-up figure (it’s closer to $83 billion) for the total amount of money Congress appropriated during the war to a fund supporting the Afghan security forces. A minority of this funding was for equipment.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim that the ‘world was at peace’ during his administration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday, as many others at the RNC did, that while he was president the world was at peace.

“Our opponents inherited a world at peace and turned it into a planet of war,” he also claimed later in his speech.

Facts First: Trump’s claim about world peace under his presidency is false. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

US troops were still deployed in combat missions in Afghanistan and Iraq; civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Somalia continued, as did the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was also ongoing, as were the conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, between Israel and Syria and between Israel and Iran; Islamist insurgents continued their fight in Africa’s Sahel region; there was major violence in Mexico’s long-running drug wars; fighting continued between Ukraine and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine’s Donbas region; and there were lots of other unresolved wars and conflicts around the world.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks armed conflict in countries around the world, said in a June email that it estimates there were active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2020 and again active armed conflicts in 51 international states in 2021.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump on Venezuela’s crime rate

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday at the Republican National Convention that “in Venezuela, crime is down 72%” because foreign governments are sending their countries’ criminals to the US.

Facts First: Trump greatly overstated the Biden-era decline in crime in Venezuela, at least according to the limited statistics that are publicly available.

And while it is certain that at least some criminals have joined law-abiding Venezuelans in a mass exodus from the country amid the economic crisis of the last decade, there is no proof Venezuela’s government has deliberately emptied prisons for migration purposes or intentionally sent ex-prisoners to the United States.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s evidence-free claim on immigration

Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that immigrants are “coming from prisons, they’re coming from jails, they’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. … Terrorists are coming in at numbers we’ve never seen before.”

Facts First: There is no evidence for Trump’s claim that jails around the world are being emptied out so that prisoners can travel to the US as migrants, nor for his claim that foreign governments are also emptying out mental health facilities for this purpose. Last year, Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence for his narrower claim at the time that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.

Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told CNN at the time they had not heard of anything that would corroborate Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing.

Trump has sometimes tried to support his claim by making another claim that the global prison population is down. But that’s wrong, too. The recorded global prison population increased from October 2021 to April 2024, from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million people, according to the World Prison Population List compiled by experts in the United Kingdom.

In response to CNN’s 2023 inquiry, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung cited one source for Trump’s claim about prisons being emptied for migration purposes – a 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart News about a supposed federal intelligence report warning Border Patrol agents that Venezuela had done this. But that vague and unverified claim about Venezuela’s actions has never been corroborated.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on US crime statistics

Former President Donald Trump claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that “our crime rate is going up, while crime statistics all over the world are going down.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim about a dramatic increase in the crime rate is false. Official data published by the FBI shows violent crime dropped significantly in the US in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, though there were increases in some communities; violent crime is now lower than it was in 2020, President Donald Trump’s last calendar year in office.

Preliminary FBI data for 2023 showed a roughly 13% national decline in murder and a roughly 6% national decline in overall reported violent crime compared to 2022, bringing both murder and violent crime levels below where they were in 2020. And preliminary FBI data for the first quarter of 2024 showed an even steeper drop from the same quarter in 2023 – a roughly 26% decline in murder and roughly 15% decline in overall reported violent crime.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump blames Biden administration for ‘greatest invasion in history’

During his RNC speech, former President Donald Trump claimed that the Biden administration has done nothing to curb illegal immigration to the US.

“The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country—they are coming in from every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East,” Trump said, “they’re coming at levels we’ve never seen before it is an invasion indeed and this administration does nothing to stop them.”

Facts First: Trump’s claim that the Biden administration is doing “nothing” is incorrect. Illegal crossings at the US border dropped in June and the Biden administration has imposed significant restrictions on asylum along with other measures to curb illegal immigration.

Arrests along the US southern border dropped 29% in June, according to new data released by US Customs and Border Protection, following the Biden administration’s order severely limiting asylum-seeker crossings.“Recent border security measures have made a meaningful impact on our ability to impose consequences for those crossing unlawfully,” CBP Acting Commissioner Troy A. Miller previously said in a statement.

Last month, the Biden administration invoked an authority to shut off access to asylum for migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally, a significant attempt to address one of the president’s biggest political vulnerabilities. It was the administration’s most dramatic move on the US southern border, using the same authority former President Donald Trump tried to use in office.

From CNN’s Holmes Lybrand

Trump makes claims about grocery prices rising under Biden

Former President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that groceries are up 57% during the Biden administration.

Facts First: Trump’s claims of grocery prices being up 57% are false and could use some context.

Inflation’s rapid ascent, which began in early 2021, was the result of a confluence of factors, including effects from the Covid-19 pandemic such as snarled supply chains and geopolitical fallout (specifically Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) that triggered food and energy price shocks. Heightened consumer demand boosted in part by fiscal stimulus from both the Trump and Biden administrations also led to higher prices, as did the post-pandemic imbalance in the labor market.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, hitting a 41-year high, and has slowed since (the Consumer Price Index was at 3% as of June 2024). However, it remains elevated from historical levels. Three-plus years of pervasive and prolonged inflation has weighed considerably on Americans, especially lower-income households trying to afford the necessities (food, shelter and transportation).

Food prices, specifically grocery prices, did outpace overall inflation for much of 2022 and 2023, driven higher by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Still, grocery prices didn’t rise to the extent that Trump claims. Annual food and grocery inflation peaked at 11.4% and 13.5% in August 2022, respectively. Since Biden took office, the CPI “food at home” index is up 21%, which is higher than its 9% typical rise in recent history over a 54-month period, but it’s not 57%.

Through the 12 months that ended in June, overall food and grocery prices were up just 2.2% and 1.1%, respectively.

Certain food categories saw much greater inflation: Notably, egg prices were up 70% annually in January 2023. However, the underlying cause of that sharp increase was a highly contagious, deadly avian flu. Food prices are highly volatile and can be influenced by a variety of factors, especially disease, extreme weather events, global supply and demand, geopolitical events, and once-in-a-lifetime pandemics.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Trump’s misleading claim about energy independence

Former President Donald Trump claimed that the US was “energy independent” during his presidency but that this changed under President Joe Biden.

Facts First: This is misleading. “Energy independent” is a political phrase, not a literal phrase, that can be defined in various ways – and, under Biden, the US has continued to satisfy the same definitions it satisfied under Trump. US production of oil and gas have set records under Biden.

“Energy independent” doesn’t mean the US uses no foreign energy or that it is untethered from global energy markets; this wasn’t the case under Trump and still isn’t under Biden. Experts in energy policy tend to scoff at the term “energy independence,” with three experts telling CNN in 2022 that it is a “horrible term,” “ridiculous term” and “stupid term,” respectively.

But if the term is defined as the US exporting more crude oil and petroleum products than it imported, that has happened in every year under Biden after happening under Trump in 2020 for the first time in decades. (In fact, the US surplus in petroleum trade has grown under Biden as US crude oil production and exports have hit new highs) And if the term is defined as the US producing more energy than it consumes, that has also continued to happen under Biden after happening under Trump in 2019for the first time in decades.

You can read here about the various economic reasons the US has imported foreign energy under both Trump and Biden despite its so-called “energy independence.”

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Trump’s false claim on his tax cuts

Former President Donald Trump once again claimed that he signed the largest tax cuts in history during his administration.

“We got credit for the war, and defeating ISIS, and so many things. The great economy, the biggest tax cuts ever, the biggest regulation cuts ever, the creation of Space Force, the rebuilding of our military. We did so much,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

The act made numerous permanent and temporary changes to the tax code, including reducing both corporate and individual income tax rates.

Trump’s 2017 tax cut, by contrast, was estimated to be about 1% of GDP.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump’s false claim US had ‘no’ inflation during his presidency

Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that inflation did not exist during his presidency – drawing a contrast between his administration and that of President Joe Biden, whose early years in office were plagued by decades-high inflation.

“We had no inflation,” Trump said in his speech at the Republican National Convention.

Facts First: Trump’s comment is false. Inflation was low, but not nothing.

The Consumer Price Index, a common measure of inflation, rose about 8% during Trump’s four years in office. In January 2021, his final partial month in office, it increased 1.4% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From CNN’s Tami Luhby

Trump repeats frequent claim about oil drilling and gas prices

As he has done repeatedly on the campaign trail, Former President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that under a new Trump administration, the United States would “drill, baby, drill, … by doing that, we will lead to a large-scale decline in prices.”

Facts First: Trump’s frequent campaign claim that the US can lower gas prices by producing more domestic oil is misleading.

Under President Joe Biden, US oil production has reached a new record this year, even surpassing output under Trump’s administration. The Energy Information Administration expects crude oil production to hit successive records this year and next, powered by an oil boom in the Permian Basin. As CNN has reported, the US currently produces more oil than any other country on the planet, at about half a million barrels per day more than the prior annual record set in 2019.

Prices at the pump in the US are highly dependent on the global oil market and the US cannot be truly energy independent when it comes to gas prices, energy experts have told CNN. Oil is a global commodity; the global price of oil determines US gas prices and it’s simply impossible to separate that price from shifting global dynamics like Russia’s war on Ukraine or OPEC’s recent decisions to cut oil production.

“Whether we’re drill baby, drilling has more to do with what the price of crude oil is, how healthy is the economy,” Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, and a former George W. Bush White House official, told CNN recently. “These things are outside of a president’s direct control.” There’s also the fact that the US consumes a different kind of oil than it produces, McNally told CNN last year. McNally compared the light crude the US produces to champagne, and the heavy crude it imports to coffee. US oil refineries are specifically built to separate out the “heavy and gunky” crude we consume, McNally said.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen

Pompeo falsely claims Biden ‘won’t even talk about’ American hostages in Gaza

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed on Thursday that President Joe Biden “won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held” in Gaza.

“And now of course a second war in Gaza. President Biden won’t even talk about the fact that Americans are still being held there by the Iranian regime,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that Biden “won’t even talk about” the American hostages in Gaza is false. Biden has spoken about the Americans held in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’ invasion of Israel several times since October.

Recently on May 31, speaking about a proposed deal for Israel and Hamas, Biden said American hostages would be released in the first phase of the deal: “[W]e want them home.”

On October 25, Biden said his administration was working “around the clock together with our partners in the region to secure the release of hostages including American citizens … left behind.”

On November 26, he spoke extensively about the release of an Israeli American little girl who was held hostage and said he was pressing for more Americans to be released, adding, “we will not stop working until every hostage is returned to their loved ones.”

Most recently, at the NATO Summit in DC last week, Biden talked about hostages broadly, saying the US “has been working to secure a ceasefire in Gaza, to bring the hostages home, to create a path for peace and stability in the Middle East.”

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Trump biographical video includes false and misleading claims

The Republican National Convention played a biographical video about former President Donald Trump before Trump began his own speech. The video included false and misleading claims.

The Trump tax cuts

The video featured a narrator making a claim that Trump himself frequently utters. The narrator said, “The Trump tax cuts: largest in America’s history.”

This is false. Analyses have found that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was not the largest in history, either in percentage of gross domestic product or inflation-adjusted dollars. You can read a detailed fact check here.

Global conflict under Trump

The video’s narrator also delivered a version of another claim Trump has made repeatedly, saying Trump’s “strength and resolve” produced “a stable world at peace.”

This claim about world peace under Trump is false, too. There were dozens of unresolved wars and armed conflicts when Trump left office in early 2021.

Americans’ incomes

While attacking President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, the video featured on-screen text that said, “U.S. incomes fall for third straight year,” attributing those words to a Wall Street Journal article in 2023. An image of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris was shown on screen at the same time.

This combination of words and images is misleading. The video didn’t acknowledge that the first of the three straight years in which the Wall Street Journal article reported that inflation-adjusted median household income went down was 2020, when Trump was president. (The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in the decline.)

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Eric Trump’s false claims about the economy and US global standing in 2016

Eric Trump told the crowd at the RNC Thursday that the “economy was struggling, jobs were scarce” and the US had poor standing on the global stage when his father was elected president in 2016.

Facts First: Eric Trump’s claims are false. When Donald Trump took office in 2017, he inherited a strong economy, including a robust labor market, and a nation that was viewed favorably on the global stage.

In 2016, the US added an average of nearly 194,000 jobs per month, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. In the two years before, those average gains were even higher: 226,000 in 2015 and nearly 250,000 in 2014.

Job gains remained above historical averages in 2017 through 2019, with 177,000 jobs added on average per month.

Eric Trump’s claims that jobs were scarce in 2016 were not accurate. In fact, the US labor market experienced its longest expansion on record starting in 2010 and continuing until March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic crippled global economies, including that of the US.

In addition to inheriting a labor market in good shape, the economy was growing when Trump took office. Real gross domestic product – the widest measure of economic activity – typically grows between 2% and 3%, and it averaged 2.4% between 2014-2016 and then nearly 2.7% during the first three years of Trump’s presidency, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

Also, the US was well regarded internationally when Barack Obama left office, and those sentiments plunged at the beginning of Trump’s presidency, according to the spring 2017 Global Attitudes Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center.

From CNN’s Alicia Wallace

Pompeo’s claim about the southern border under Trump

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed at the Republican National Convention Thursday that the US-Mexico border was “closed” during Donald Trump’s presidency.

Facts First: Pompeo’s claim is false.

While Trump tightened the border during his tenure, illegal crossings into the US from Mexico still numbered in the tens of thousands each month leading up to when he left office. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration limited non-essential travel on the US-Mexico border and prohibited migrants from crossing it in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. President Joe Biden later extended the restrictions.

The former president’s biggest effort to “close” the border was met with resistance by federal courts, and the Supreme Court later gave Biden the green light to end the controversial “Remain in Mexico” policy.

From CNN’s Devan Cole

Trump makes false claims about election fraud in RNC video

For the fourth straight night, the Republican National Convention played a video in which former President Donald Trump urged Republicans to use “every appropriate tool available to beat the Democrats,” including voting by mail. Trump relentlessly disparaged mail-in voting during the 2020 election, falsely claiming it was rife with fraud, and he has continued to sharply criticize it during the current campaign

But Trump’s comments in the convention video also included some of his regular false claims about elections. After claiming he would “once and for all secure our elections” as president, Trump again insinuated the 2020 election was not secure, saying, “We never want what happened in 2020 to happen again.” And he said, “Keep your eyes open, because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and frankly, it’s the only thing they do well.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are nonsense – slightly vaguer versions of his usual lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen and that Democrats are serial election cheaters. The 2020 election was highly secure; Trump lost fair and square to Joe Biden by an Electoral College margin of 306 to 232; there is no evidence of voter fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state; and there is no basis for claiming that election cheating is the only thing at which Trump’s opponents excel.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Pompeo’s false claim about spy balloons

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Thursday evening that under former President Donald Trump’s administration, “not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across” the US.

“We’d begun on an honorable exit from Afghanistan, and not a single Chinese spy balloon flew across the United States of America,” Pompeo said.

Facts First: The claim that there were no spy balloons under Trump is false.

Three suspected Chinese spy balloons transited over the continental US during the Trump administration, but they were not discovered until after President Joe Biden took office. Gen. Glen VanHerck, then commander of US Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, said in 2023 that a “domain awareness gap” allowed the balloons to travel undetected.

From CNN’s Haley Britzky

Linda McMahon’s misleading claim on tariffs

Linda McMahon, who served in the Trump administration as the Small Business Administrator, suggested at the Republican National Convention Thursday that China paid the tariffs that the former president put on roughly $300 billion of Chinese-made goods. “Instead of taxing American companies, Donald Trump put tariffs on China that raised billions of dollars and protected American industries,” she said.

Facts First: This characterization of Trump’s tariffs is misleading.

It’s true that Trump’s tariffs on China raised billions of dollars for the US government, but the duties were paid by US companies – not China.

Study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission (USITC), has found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.

Once an importing company pays the tariff, it can decide to eat the cost or pass all or some of it to the buyer of its goods – whether that’s a retailer or a consumer.

Many economists agree that tariffs act as a tax on American consumers.

“A tariff is just a form of a tax,” Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, told CNN earlier this year.

Tariffs can benefit some companies by raising the prices of competing foreign-made goods, but the duties can hurt other companies by raising component parts they need to manufacture.

For example, Trump’s tariffs were imposed, in part, to boost the US manufacturing sector – but that industry lost jobs.

Federal Reserve economists found a net decrease in manufacturing employment due to the tariffs in 2019. That’s mostly because goods became more expensive to US consumers. Plus, retaliatory tariffs put on American-made goods made other US manufacturers less competitive when selling abroad.

From CNN’s Katie Lobosco

RNC video featuring Reagan’s voice misleadingly twists magazine article

A video played on the final night of the Republican National Convention tried to attack President Joe Biden by featuring quotes from then-candidate Ronald Reagan’s famous rhetorical questions about the President Jimmy Carter era at a presidential debate against Carter in 1980.

At one point, the video featured Reagan’s voice asking if, compared to four years ago, “Is America as respected throughout the world as it was?” On-screen text answered the question with the words “allies no longer trust the United States,” attributing them to a September 2021 article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

Facts First: This quote is misleading. The article in Foreign Affairs didn’t actually declare that allies no longer trust the United States. Rather, the article noted that “critics of President Joe Biden” make the “claim” that allies no longer trust the US after Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan – but the article then went on to argue that “these concerns about credibility are overblown.”

The convention video also featured Reagan’s voice asking, “Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago?” But if you go back precisely four years from the most recent unemployment rate, the answer is: less unemployment. The current unemployment rate is 4.1% for June 2024; four years prior, in June 2020, the unemployment rate was 11.0% amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

There is a reasonable basis for this part of the video, though, if you interpret “four years ago” more broadly to refer to any time in 2020. Before the pandemic, in the first two months of 2020, the unemployment rates were 3.6% and 3.5%.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

We’ll have the reviews of the Democratic National Convention from Daniel Dale and his CNN colleagues on Wednesday.

Pre-People

Posted on August 21, 2024 by bpriddy

The Secretary of State has counted signatures and has cleared a proposed constitutional amendment legalizing abortion for the November ballot.

It has taken no time for Rep. Brian Seitz to say that if the amendment passes, he will introduce a bill for next year’s legislature declaring fetuses as people or in the terms of the proposal, “unborn children,” giving them the same legal protections as people who have been born.

We are going to raise several questions that are not intended to disparage Rep. Seitz or his efforts but are intended to take the discussion beyond the surface level. They’re philosophical more than they are ideological although the discussion next year at the Capitol is expected to be along lines of ideology which could mean the discussions are more likely to be arguments that will be less thoughtful and reasoned and will be more angry than cooly considerate.

Rep. Seitz is an interesting guy. He’s a military veteran and a Baptist minister from Branson and is a devoted fan of Superman. His office is decorated with the big guy’s “S” memorabilia and the Representative often wears Superman stuff—as you’ll see from this picture from the Young Americans for Liberty.

House rules require certain levels of dress decorum so you won’t see him on the House floor in blue tights and a cape. But Superman neckties are allowed. And lapel pins.

In the 2022 session, he introduced a bill to ban the use of abortion pills to end ectopic pregnancies—pregnancies in which the fetus attaches outside the uterus, a situation in which the fetus is not likely to survive, a condition that in rare cases has been fatal to the woman.

It is not a simple issue, nor is the issue of fetal personhood (which would apply to ectopic pregnancies, we suppose).

Anyway—some questions that come to mind about fetuses as people:

Several years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were people when it comes to free political speech, a decision that has in the view of many people allowed for all kinds of campaign finance inequities and has furthered the development of oligarchical government. Would this legislation declare that fetuses have the same legal standing as corporations?

They couldn’t make campaign donations, of course, but couldn’t this open up all kinds of mischief by political surrogates?

Speaking of surrogates. A fetus carried by a surrogate—-who has the final say in what happens to that fetus? The woman carrying it? The parent who supplied the egg? The parent who supplied the sperm? All three? One? Now you have three contributors to the fetus’s existence. Who has the final say BECAUSE——

If the fetus has the same citizenship rights as the woman who is carrying it, shouldn’t the woman—-especially if the pro=choice amendment passes in November—have the right to abort it under the state constitution?

If the woman asserts her right, can she be charged with a crime for doing something that is constitutionally legal? Does she need permission from the egg donor or the sperm donor?

If the amendment is adopted, does not the constitution supersede state law, thereby giving he pregnant woman the ultimate authority?

If the fetus is considered an “unborn person,” should the state have some sort of a record of the creation of this person, i.e. a conception certificate that is kind of a pre-birth certificate that states the names of the parents, a conception date (because if the fetus dies before birth, should there not be a death certificate because it is a person?) or fertilization date or is the implant date the one that should be recorded?

Is a frozen fertilized egg considered a fetus? To some who argue that life begins when the sperm hits the egg, the answer would be yes, would it not? Then would we have thousands of frozen persons in various facilities throughout the state?

If a fetus is a person, will a name be required? How will one know whether the proper name is Jane or John in the first hours after egg and sperm get together?

And in the non-laboratory process of conception, how will the parents know the exact date of fetus-hood and pre-birth (for lack of a better term).

If a woman’s body self-aborts with a miscarriage, who is responsible for the death of this “unborn person.” A person will have died. Should there be a funeral and a burial or a cremation? Should there be a death certificate. If there is, what would fill the gap in the form for age?

We admit that some of these questions are pretty off the wall. But we think they bear at least a certain level of reality.

Many years ago, almost fifty of them—it was in the early days of The Missourinet’s coverage of the legislature (we went on the air January 2, 1975)— we were covering a hearing on an abortion bill and legislator asked a question of a pro-life witness that has stuck in our mind.

“When does ensoulment occur””

When does a fetus gain a soul and thus become something more than an undifferentiated cluster of cells—a person? I think I would have remembered if there had been a cogent answer to that question. But it’s a good one to be asked under these circumstances.

We are dealing with the two basic issues of our existence here. Life and Death. These issues are not be dealt with lightly or with political frivolity.

Sports: KC, STL Going Opposite Directions; Chiefs Sleight of Hand; And Other Stuff

Posted on August 20, 2024 by bpriddy

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(Baseball)—Here it is in a nutshell. The Cincinnati Reds swept the St. Louis Cardinals. The Kansas City Royals swept the Cincinnati Reds. Our Cardinals and our Royals continue to surprise—the Royals by their continued steady, winning, play. The Cardinals by their inconsistent, losing efforts.

(Royals)—The Kansas City Royals are hanging onto the fourth wild card slot in the American League Playoffs despite having a better record than one of the teams headed for an automatic place. The Royals, at 69-55 are two games better off than the Houston Astros, who lead the West Division over Seattle by four games. The Royals are third in the Central Division, three games behind Cleveland and a game behind Minnesota. They have the fifth-best record in the American League.

Cleveland, New York, and Houston are the division leaders after the weekend’s games. Baltimore, Minnesota, and Kansas City led the wild card standings. Boston is 3.5 games behind Kansas City for the last playoff spot.

(CARDINALS)—We’ve seen this before. The Cardinals get off to a slow start then show a flicker of hope in the early summer only to slide out of the picture. The Cardinals are now five games behind the Braves in the search for a wild card playoff opportunity and the margin was gradually widened as the Redbirds continue to play uninspiring baseball. They’ve won only five times in their last sixteen games

It could get worse. The Brewers open a series in St. Louis tonight (Tuesday). One sports betting source gives St. Louis a 4.2 percent chance of making the playoffs.

(MIZ)—Luther Burden III has been declared a first team preseason All-American by the Associated Press, the latest in a string of honors nine days before the first game. ESPN and The Athletic also have him as a first-team All-American. He’s on the watch list for the Biletnikoff Award that does to the country’s top wide receiver after being a semifinalist last year, and he is also on the list for the Maxwell Award, given to the most outstanding player in college football (The Athletic reports that winners of the Maxwell Award have a better record as pro players than winners of the Heisman Trophy).

Last year, as a sophomore, he racked up 1,212 yards receiving and scored nine touchdowns, the last of which sealed Missouri’s win against Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl. Burden is projected as a first-round NFL draft pick next year. (ZOU!!!)

(What Was That!!??!!)—The Kansas City Chiefs have lost both of their exhibition games in this pre-season, falling to Detroit 24-23 on a last-second field goal. But what caught the eye of the fans was Patrick Mahomes’ behind-the-back pass to Travis Kelce.

Mahomes claimed after the game that it was an ad-libbed play. Kelce didn’t agree…

Bing Videos

The Chiefs played their regulars for most of the first half.

They play their third and final exhibition game of the season next weekend.

Now, the zoom stuff

(INDYCAR)—Josef Newgarden picked up a spin-and-win during the weekend in the race at Madison, Illinois, the St. Louis Gateway Arch visible behind the track administrative building in turn one.

Newgarden led only the last seventeen laps of the race but angered some of his competitors with a perceived slow start at the end of the last caution period that resulted in a four-can pileup at the head of the front straightaway that knocked out some challengers and brought out the red flag with eight laps left.

Newgarden finished 1.72 seconds ahead of teammate and pole-sitter Scott McLaughlin. Rookie Linus Lundqvist equalled his career-best finish with a third.

The race saw 676 on-track passes for position, 254 of them for position, 115 among top-ten drivers and 44 among the top five.

Palou now leads the standings by 59 points over Colton Herta and by 65 points over six-time series champion, Scott Dixon. IndyCar has only four races left this year.

The race saw a record 21 lead changes, an IndyCar record at the track. Despite Newgarden’s win, points leader Alex Palou extended his lead in the standings with a fourth-place finish.

(NASCAR)—It took two days, but a sorrowful Tyler Reddick picked up the win at Michigan International Speedway, his second victory of the year. In victory lane, he said, “I can’t help but sit here in victory lane and think of Scott Bloomquist. Huge mentor to me, and an incredible role model and legend of dirt racing and motorsports.”

Bloomquist was killed in a plane crash last week. He was 60 years old, a legend in dirt track racing. “The last couple of days have been tough. This really helps it. This win should go for him, his family and friends,” said Reddick.

The race was stopped after 51 laps on Sunday by heavy rain.

Last week’s winner, Austin Dillon, was 17^th at Michigan. Since the controversial finish a week ago, NASCAR has allowed Dillon to keep his trophy but has penalized him enough points to drop him from 27^th to 31^st in points. NASCAR also has ruled his victory will not entitle him to be in the 12-driver field for the playoffs.

Dillon had caused Joey Logano to crash on the last lap and had bumped Denny Hamlin out of the way on the way to the finish line.

Driver Corey LaJoie climbed unhurt from his car that crashed in the mid-race, slid upside down for several years before doing a barrel roll before stopping.

LaJoie unhurt in Michigan flip (msn.com)

The regular NASCAR season has only two races left before the playoffs begin. Reddick’s win has elevated him to the top of the regular season standings. The next races is at Daytona next Saturday night with the regular season ending at Darlington. The last ten races will be elimination races that will leave four drivers to race for the championship in the last race of the year.

(FORMLA 1)—F1 has ten races left this year. It returns after its traditional summer break next weekend.

Notes From a Quiet (and Boring) Road

Posted on August 14, 2024 by bpriddy

Just got back yesterday afternoon from visits to relatives in New Mexico and Colorado, where the dry heat was wonderful and where you could almost hear your flesh sizzle if you stood out in that dry heat too long.

It was so wonderful to drive a couple thousand miles and see few billboards. If other states operated as Missouri does, the majestic windmills of Kansas and Colorado would have been obscured by junk roadside art and I use the word “art” advisedly.

Nancy has a new car. It has adaptive cruise control that keeps you a safe distance behind a car or truck in front of you. I thought I wouldn’t like it. I do. I set the speed at 85 and let the control run the car with the traffic while it maintained appropriate intervals between our vehicle and the ones in front. It even threw on the brakes if somebody swerved into our lane. An interesting experience.

I did turn off the feature than keeps the car between the lines. I don’t weave but it was still irritating. We did not try to find out how many miles we could go on the interstate without touching the steering wheel. Cars are close to that, but we don’t trust the system yet—plus this car demands you put hands back on the wheel in a short time. It also keeps track of what you are looking at and if you aren’t eyes-forward, you get dinged.

Ding. And there’s a message between the speedometer and the tachometer telling you to keep your eyes on the road. And open. No sleeping while driving this car.

Got home and found a message in my email (hadn’t checked it today) from Amazon wanting my opinion on something I had bought before the trip—a new lens for my camera. Both of us find these messages irritating. Everybody wants to know if we are joyful about our purchase. I’ve ignored many such solicitations, but Amazon was persistent wanting to know how I used the item and was I happy. So yesterday I told Amazon:

I used this lens to take pictures.

I also am tired of every Tom, Dick, and Harry company I do business with asking if I’m a happy customer. If I am, I will express it by buying something else later. If not, my silence will be sufficient. Quit wasting my time by begging for a compliment. It’s as irritating as the restaurant bill that gives me choices for tips.

After all—what the heck does one do with a camera lens? Swat flies? Roll out a pie crust? Punch cookies out of the cookie dough? Make biscuits? It might make an ashtray with the lens hood screwed on.

Okay, I was a little cranky. We had driven through rain from Salina to past Kansas City after a long previous day of watching I-70 disappear under the hood of our car from the Denver area to Salina.

People think Kansas is boring. We, from two families with Kansas roots, respectfully disagree. INTERSTATE SEVENTY is boring. But Kansas is a pretty interesting place—as are all places if we give ourselves the chance to travel some smaller roads.

Anyway, we finished the rest of our trip from Kansas City to Jefferson City on highways—particularly I-70—that are uglified by billboards.

Now, if billboards obscured views of the advertised adult entertainment stores that also highlight our Missouri roadways, we might soften our opinion of them.

The great American poet Ogden Nash once channeled Joyce Kilmer (who was a man, in case your schooling never mentioned that) when he wrote:

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree

Perhaps unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all*

It has taken more time than usual to prepare this meditation. Minnie the cat has been extremely glad to welcome us home and has insisted on several re-acquaintance lap times. Brother Max, the mellow one of the pair, is happy to sit in a box on the table next to the desk and be quietly close.

Pets make coming home even better.

*Another of Nash’s non-Nobel Prize works of literature is:

The only thing wrong with a kitten

Is that

Eventually,

It becomes a cat.

(we do not share that opinion. Most of the time)

Sports: Missouri Olympians and other sports

Posted on August 13, 2024 by bpriddy

By Bob Priddy, Missourinet Contributing Editor

(Our travels have kept us from posting our weekly roundup by about 21½ hours. But we wanted to pay tribute to our Missouri athletes who were in Paris and had to wait until now to find time to go through the posting process.)

(PARIS)—A few won medals. More will come home to tell their grandchildren they participated. Let’s run down how Missourians of one sort or another did in Paris during the last couple of weeks:

Rajindra Campbell, who was part of the Missouri Southern track team for three years, 2018-2021, won the bronze medal in the shotput, representing Jamaica. He’s the first Jamaican to win a shotput medal and the first former Missouri Southern athlete to win a medal in the Olympics.

Napheesa Collier of St. Louis, a member of the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA, was a member of the gold medal-winning women’s basketball team.

Jayson Tatum of St. Louis, a member of the Boston Celtics, won gold with the men’s basketball team.

Another gold medal went to Kansas City’s Quincy Hall won gold in he 400 meters.

Kansas City’s Chris Nilsen, a silver medalist in 2020, was 11^th in the pole vault in Paris.

Freddie Crittenden II, a St. Louis native, was 6^th in the 110-meter hurdles.b/

Tyler Downs of Ballwin was 8^th in the three-meter springboard.

St. Louis native Brendan Miller was 17^th in the 800 meter run.

Patrick Schulte of St Charles was a member of the men’s soccer team that lost to Morocco in the quarter-finals. He’s with the Columbus Crew of the MLS.

Emily Sisson of St. Louis County was 23^rd in the women’s marathon.

MU alum Karissa Schweitzer was 10^th in the 5000 meters and 9^th in the 10,000.

Another MU alum, Mikel Schreuders, competing for Aruba, was 26^th in both the 50 and 100 meters. He was the country’s flag bearer in the opening ceremony.

Another MU alum, Clement Secchi, competing for France in swimming events, won bronze in the 4×100 relay and was 14^th in the 100 meter butterfly.

Staff Sgt. Rachel Tozier of Pattonsburg was 18^th in the women’s trap shooting.—

(BASEBALL)—Both of our teams started the week with losses. But the Royals are still in the playoff standings, two games upon Seattle. The Cardinals are now only one game above break-even and are not a playoff team, a game and a half behind the Mets.

(FOOTBALL)—Ready or not, here it comes. Football. The Chiefs have played their first exhibition game, losing to Jacksonville 26-13.

We are 16 days away from the first Missouri Tiger game. The AP’s preseason poll has the Tigers 11^th.

Sports with motors:

(NASCAR)—Austin Dillon won the 400-miler at Richmond but he and owner Richard Childress might be the only people happy about it. Dillon Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin on the last lap of the first overtime session to take the win. NASCAR says it is reviewing the whole scenario. Normally, it announces penalties on Tuesdays but it delayed any announcement this week.

(INDYCAR)===IndyCar will run is first post-Olympics race within driving distance of a lot of Missouri fans—-at Worldwide Technology Raceway just across the river from St. Louis. It’s a Saturday evening race. Scott Dixon and Josef Newgarden have won six of the eight races at WWTR since IndyCar returned to the track after a long absence. Pato O’Ward has been a bridesmaid but never a bride in his five career starts there, with top five finishes in all of the races and runnerups three times in the last four years.

(FORMULA 1)—F1 is enjoying its mid-year break—which coincided with the Pris Olympics. The season has surprised some observers by how competitive it has become, especially in the last half-dozen races or do.

Four different teams have racked up wins this year, seven of them by Red Bull, the long-dominant team in the sport. But Red Bull has not been the dominant force recently, with McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes moving to the front. Red Bull drivers have seven wins. Mercedes has three (in the last four races) with McLaren and Ferrari posting two wins apiece. It is the first time since 2021 that four different teams have won races in a season. Seven drivers have posted wins this year.

GWOT Failure and its Coattails

Posted on August 12, 2024 by bpriddy

(NOTE—This material originally was posted for August 1, the day before the primary election. It was posted in unreadable form so we are re-posting it today. Although the entry refers to candidates in the primary election, the issues remain for the general election so we are re-posting the entry to discuss those issues because they remain valid for the primary survivors who will make them issues in their new campaigns.)

One would think, to view some Missouri candidates’ commercials that our state is being overrun by fentanyl-fueled escaped mental patients, prison escapees, murderers, rapists, robbers—-and probably some shoplifters and car thieves just to be inclusive—from south of the border. .

Several of these candidates for statewide office have promised to “fix” the illegal immigrant problem (aka “unregistered immigrant” problem), a national issue that has been made only worse by a couple of governors who have “fixed” their problems by shipping immigrants—legally here or not—to other states. The Missouri candidates have not told us how they are going to solve a national problem.

There have been promises of mobilizing all of the law enforcement agencies in the state and even calling out the National Guard to end this overwhelming threat, which sounds like a good time to achieve your dream of driving 150 mph on I-70 because there sure won’t be any deputies or troopers left to catch you because they are out hauling in people generally of Central American origin.

One candidate has stated he personally will drive the buses stuffed with these folks back to the border—to Texas, which has one of the governors shipping immigrants to other states. He could call it “Operation Return to Sender.”

That’s great public policy—getting into an immigrant-shipping war with another state.

Sheesh! What a bunch of nonsense all of this is.

But a lot of our candidates for statewide office have spent campaign funds to go to Texas so they can produce a commercial showing them bravely standing in front of the Great Wall of Trump and most sincerely telling us they will solve the illegal immigrant problem. The whole darned thing.

And there’s a point they hope voters won’t think about—that Biden’s “failed immigration policies” are to a significant degree the failure of the GWOT to do the job our former president promised it would do. Perhaps his “beautiful wall” hasn’t saved us after all.

And by the way, in the eight years since he told us the GWOT would stop the flow of these dangerous men, women, and children—and Mexico would pay for it—we’re still waiting to see the first check signed by the President of our southern neighbor.

If the GWOT was working as well as its advocates said back in 2016 that it would, we wouldn’t have these problems and our candidates could be focused instead on what they will do with the REAL problems Missourians face, including—

—a chronically unfunded mental health system

—domestic homelessness (I haven’t seen any immigrants, legal or illegal, on the streets of Missouri’s Capital City.)

—underfunded payments to nursing homes

—Loss of Medicaid coverage for thousands of Missouri’s children and delays in providing medical care for them.

—Straightening out the state’s troubled foster care program

—Continued weak state compensation to counties for housing state prisoners

—Uncertain future for road and bridge funding

—weak support for veterans hospitals

—-advisability of state funding for stadiums in KC and St. Louis.

—-inadequate health and reproductive care for women (The privately-funded Commonwealth Fund, which focuses on health care issues, recently ranked Missouri 40^th out of 51 states and DC in this category.)

We could go on and on but the only thing the candidates seem to want to go on and on about is the immigrant problem. You’d think we’re being overrun by illegal immigrants from south of the border—all of whom, to hear the candidates tell it, are threats to our society and our safety.

They are quite willing to play fast and loose with the facts when they blame unregistered immigrants for high crime problems.

The Brennan Center, founded at the New York University School of law by former clerks of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, Jr., reported in late May:

In the past few months, politicians and certain media outlets have latched on to a narrative that recent immigrants, especially undocumented ones, are causing spikes in crime. Instead of gathering data and examining the issue empirically, they are making this broad assertion based on highly publicized individual incidents of crime by undocumented immigrants. All acts of violence must be taken seriously. But policymakers should not attribute blame to entire classes of people when individuals commit crimes.

The research does not support the view that immigrants commit crime or are incarcerated at higher rates than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants might have less law enforcement contact compared to nonimmigrants. Focusing on the facts is imperative, especially given that immigration has become a top issue for voters ahead of the election.

Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite. Studies have also examined the impact of the concentration of immigrants in a community on crime patterns, finding that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and an increase in structural factors — such as social connection and economic opportunity — that are linked to neighborhood safety.

When looking specifically at the relationship between undocumented immigrants and crime, researchers come to similar conclusions. Numerous studies show that undocumented immigration does not increase violent crime; research examining crime rates in so-called sanctuary cities also found no discernable difference when compared to similarly situated cities without sanctuary policies. One study that focused on drug crimes and driving under the influence found that unauthorized immigration status was associated with reductions in arrests for those offenses.

The research also shows that overall, immigrants have a similar or even lower likelihood of incarceration compared to native-born Americans, a trend that holds for immigrants from various source countries. For example, one study found that undocumented immigrants are 33 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. Indications of a negative relationship between immigration and crime also emerge when looking at conviction rates.

In a Texas study, undocumented immigrants were found to be 47 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime in 2017 than native-born Americans. More recently, a study looked at census data over a 150-year period; since 1870, incarceration rates of immigrants are actually slightly lower than U.S.-born people and that gap widens in recent years with immigrants 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.

Despite claims from conservative media and campaign rhetoric pointing to immigration as the cause of crime increases, there is no evidence that immigration — and in particular the recent influx of immigrants to Democratic-run cities — is causing a “crime wave.”

The Pew Research Center reported in 2017 that, nationally, 45% of our foreign-born population were naturalized citizens. Another 27% were lawful permanent residents. Another six percent were temporary lawful residents. Only 34% were unauthorized immigrants—some 10.5 million people spread throughout our 50 states.

World Population Review noted in 2020, at the end of the Trump term, that this country “has the highest immigration population in the world at 50.6 million” people, about 15% of our total population. And we welcomed people from more than 200 countries and territories. The Review noted that in 2020, Mexico had the most immigrants to this country (hardly a surprise) at more than 100,000, more than the number of immigrants from India (47,000) and China (41,000) combined. Here’s a compilation of our top ten contributors of immigrants.

Here’s the compilation of our top ten immigrant-contributing countries as of 2020:

Mexico 100,325

India 46,363

China 41,483

Dominican Republic 30,005

Vietnam 29,995

Philippines 25,491

El Salvador, 17,907

Brazil 16,746

Cuba 16,367

South Korea, 16,244

Honestly, do we REALLY have an immigration problem in Missouri? We certainly do not have one that merits the scare language we are hearing from some of our political candidates.

We turn to the American Immigration Council that says only four percent of Missouri’s population are immigrants while another four percent of us are native-born but have at least one immigrant parent. That works out to 122,742 women, 111,553 men, and 24,095 children.

Eighty-six percent of Missouri’s emigrants speak English “well” or “very well.”

Seventeen percent of our immigrants have less than a high school diploma. That’s about double the percent of native-born Missourians. Thirty-one percent of our native-born Missourians have not progressed beyond high school, almost twice the percentage of the immigrant population (18%).

But College education? Sixty-five percent of immigrant Missourians have some college or a college degree or more. That’s five percentage points more than the natives. And when it comes to degrees, 44% of our immigrants have one but only 29% of the natives do.

Now we get to the exportables.

The Pew Trust says we have about 60,000 undocumented immigrants in Missouri. That is only about ONE ONE-HUNDREDTH OF ONE PERCENT (0.01) of our population.

These candidates expect us get all frothy about 1/100^thof 1% percent of the population of Missouri—and they want to expend huge amounts of resources to run them out of the state while refusing to indicate any sort of leadership on more broadly-significant needs for the remaining 99.99% of us.

No matter what you might think of undocumented immigrants, consider the family disruptions that will happen with the great immigrant roundup—More than 34,500 United States citizens live with at least one undocumented family member, according to American Progress.org, which also says two percent of Missouri’s children live with at least one undocumented family member.

The numbers also include 3,010 “dreamers,” young people covered under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Another 37-hundred people have been granted legal status under the program.

Five percent of Missouri’s labor force are immigrant workers—more than 164,000 people. About 31,400 of those people work in manufacturing, 24,600 are in health care and social assistance. Nineteen thousand more are in accommodation and food services, 19,000 are in educational services and more than 15,500 are in professional. Scientific, and technical services.

Taxes don’t care if someone is legal or illegal. If they get a paycheck, they pay taxes and newamericaneconomy.org says immigrants paid almost two-Billion dollars in federal taxes and more than 790 million dollars in state and local taxes in 2018. UNDOCUMENTED immigrants paid an estimated 107-million dollars in federal taxes and more than 62-million in state and local taxes that same year.

Our immigrants spent $6.8-Billion in Missouri in 2018.

And almost 15,000 of them owned businesses that, in 2018 generated about $400-million in business income.

There undoubtedly are newer statistics but they likely are different only by a few degrees.

About those illegals—

The Migration Policy Institute figures Missouri has 54,000 unauthorized immigrants. About two-thirds are from Mexico and Central America. Two-thirds have been in this state for ten or fewer years.

Four-thousand of them are younger than 16. More than half are 25-55. Eight thousand are married to a United States citizen. Three-thousand more are married to a legal permanent resident.

Twenty-nine percent of the immigrants are not in the work force—many being children and/or stay-at-home parents.

One statistic that is missing from all of these studies is a statistic often cited but does not exist.:

—how many jobs terrible people have “taken” from Missourians. Let’s see some statistics on the “replacement” contention that show a genuine effort to replace American workers with unregistered foreigners.

There is no immigrant Mafia walking into businesses, pointing guns at owners’ heads, and telling them to give a job to an immigrant or to fire a native Missourian so an immigrant can have a particular position. Have you ever seen any help-wanted ads that say, “Native-born Missourians not wanted?” Immigrants are not replacing anybody.

Immigrants are the political whipping boys and girls of too many of our candidates who apparently have nothing significant to offer in terms of initiatives and programs that will help all ends of all boats to rise.

If the GWOT had done its job, these candidates might have nothing to talk about except more important issues that have a direct impact on all of us—-and Heaven forbid that they might ever do that.

The Pot Calling the Kettle—-

Posted on August 12, 2024 by bpriddy

Black? Indian?

It has taken no time for Donald Trump to make ethnicity an attack point in the presidential race. There is no reason for having done it but few, at least on the Left, will accuse Trump of being reasonable anyway. His track record of denigration of others is well-recognized but applauded by many who find his politically judgmental attitudes and actions fit their views of others who do not look, worship, or otherwise fit their guidelines for respect as fellow citizens.

A part of our political system seems unable to survive without finding others who do not deserve to be belittled or even hated, tomust be belittle and hate.

My generation remembers the pronouncements that John Kennedy would take orders from the Vatican if he became President. More recently, we were battered by those who made false claims about Barrack Obama’s birth as well as his ethnic history, including those who pointed to his middle name, Hussein, as an indication he might have had ties to Muslim terrorism.

Now, Donald Trump—-himself a mix of ancestral roots—is raising false insinuations about Kamala Harris with her emergence as a tangible threat to his dreams of absolute power. His attack made before an audience of Black journalists, no less, has underlined and bold-faced one word his critics have used many times to describe him: Racist:

“I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Several people DID look into it and quickly considered the comment one of Trumps most blatant lies and a clear injection of racism into the campaign.

Here’s one fact check:

Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black – FactCheck.org

Trump is hardly one to question the ethnicity of others—–because he has made questionable claims about his own. In fact, he has lied about it. In print.

Natasha Frost of the New York Times has written:

Trump’s international origins make him relatively unusual among American presidents. Of the last 10 presidents, only two—Trump and Barack Obama—have had a parent born outside of the United States. Trump’s own immediate family has been similarly international: Two of his three wives were naturalized American citizens, originally from the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Only one of his five children, Tiffany, is the child of two American-born citizens, while his daughter, Ivanka, is the first Jewish member of the First Family in American history. But so far as his biographers have been able to tell, none of his international roots extends to Sweden.

A-ha. Sweden. Frost, who has looked at Trump’s familial roots, reports Grandpa Friedrich Trump gave up his career as a 16-year old barber in GERMANY and came here in 1885 to escape three years of required service in the German military. But Trump denied the truth of his circumstances, maintaining for years, even in his co-written The Art of the Deal, that Friedrich came here from Scandinavia. A family historian told the newspaper the lie was started by Trump’s father, Fred, who did not want to alienate Jewish clients and friends by acknowledging the family’s German background.

“Trump is the son, and grandson, of immigrants: German on his father’s side, and Scottish on his mother’s. None of his grandparents, and only one of his parents, was born in the United States or spoke English as their mother tongue (His mother’s parents, from the remote Scottish Outer Hebrides, lived in a majority Gaelic-speaking community.),” Frost wrote.

Donald is the grandson of Friedrich, who was not Swedish, Norwegian, or Finnish. He was one of more than about one million Germans to immigrate to the USA in 1885—seeking the same things that immigrants look for today. Their “wall” was the Atlantic Ocean.

But Trump’s family overcame that wall. We will leave it to you to consider any irony in his story.

“Trump” as a Swede? Only if his real name was “Trumpsson.”

As for Friedrich, it is not on the list of 100 top names for Swedish boys. The top ten, by the way, are Noah, Hugo, William, Liam, Nils, Elias, Oliver, Adam. August, and Sam

The attack on Kamala Harris was uncalled for. But what else is new when it comes from Donald Trump? And after all, wouldn’t you want to deny your German heritage if you had a running made that once wrote his college roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?”

Four years ago, reporter Ella Lee of USA TODAY reviewed 28 Trump comments deemed racist. Her conclusion: “Of the 28 listed comments, Trump said 12 of them as plainly stated. Two he said but lack context. Four comments are disputed, eight are paraphrased from similar statements and two he did not say.”

Fact check: 12 of 28 Trump comments deemed racist are direct speech (usatoday.com)

Adequate time has passed and millions of words have been spoken since then that an update is merited, including an evaluation of his claim that he is the best President that black people have had since Abraham Lincoln with no exceptions for Harry Truman’s integration of the military and Lyndon Johnson’s pushing for and signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s.

We are supposed to have some debates in September, depending on how Mr. Trump feels when he takes to Truth Social on any particular day. We will wait to see if he can do more than call people names by then or wallow in more language that is, in the least, insensitive.

The Swede vs. the Indian. What a match that could be.

(NOTE: We have posted a second entry today—-a re-post of a column originally dated August 1 but was unreadable thanks to a huge blunder by your editor, We hope we do not overburden you by this double post.)

The Young and the Old

Posted on August 5, 2024 by bpriddy

Tomorrow is—–well, you know.

(I thought that we deserve some nicer things in this space today than the intense reviews of the campaigns and campaigners that we have been posting. I’ve been saving this one for just such a day and suddenly in this year in which age has become such a headline, this seems kind of appropriate.)

One of my former reporters, Drew Vogel, who was on the Missourinet staff in the 1970s, has gone on to a thirty-year-plus career as a well-respected Ohio nursing home administrator. He wrote this in his blog on July 6, 2019:

Ramblin’ on a Saturday morning –Youngest and Oldest of us

I recently read a story out of Kansas City about a seven-year-old who dresses up like a policeman and visits nursing homes. He cheers up residents by giving hugs and writing them tickets for being “too cute.”

There’s an eleven-year-old girl in Arkansas who is CEO of an organization that raises money to grant simple wishes to nursing home residents – things like a Happy Meal or a pair of slippers. She’s raised over a quarter of a million dollars.

Too often the most significant thing missing from an older person’s life is not a spouse or friends who have passed away, not lack of money or even reduced creative or intellectual stimulation.

No, it’s the disappearance of children from their lives.

I witnessed it myself.

When we moved to Florida in 1980, my son Bobby was seven or eight years old. We didn’t have a boat, but we went fishing a lot. Pier fishing.

In those days you didn’t even need a license to fish off the pier. After I left Florida 30 years ago the state changed that. For the greater good, you now have to buy a salt water fishing license to pier-fish.

Fish tend to bite when the tides are running. Coming in or going out. Doesn’t seem to matter.

Between the tides – it’s called a slack tide – the fish take a siesta.

We were fishing from the pier at Ft. Desoto State Park near St. Petersburg. Bobby was the only youngster on the pier. I was the only working-age adult. There were maybe eight retired gentlemen.

When the tide stopped, Bobby noticed several of the men were still catching fish. He went to see how they were doing it.

“Dad,” he said running back to me a few minutes later, “give me some money.” He needed to buy squid for bait and a few little tiny hooks.

The grandpas on the pier had showed him how to catch the angel fish that nibbled on the barnacles attached to the pilings.

Bobby caught a few, but every time one of the retired gentlemen snagged one they would yell for Bobby and put the fish in his bucket.

At one point I told Bobby to quit bothering people. One of the guys said, “He’s not bothering anyone. All our grandkids are up North. We love having little boys out here on the pier.”

I never mentioned it again.

We took about two dozen fish home that day – all angel fish. Bobby and I fileted them, put them in a pan with some butter and lemon and stuck it in the oven.

Dinner was on Bobby that night. Boy, was he proud. And it was all because of a connection between kids and seniors.

I was administrator of the Ohio Veterans Home in Georgetown, Ohio the year the H1N1 virus was going around – the Swine Flu.

I cancelled trick-or-treat in the facility that year because there was so much of the influenza in the county.

I nearly got lynched.

The residents, many of whom were big tough, old war veterans – guys who had fought in combat – cried foul. They confronted me at a Resident Council meeting.

“We love it when the kids visit us,’ was the general context of their complaint.

“And I like it when you guys are breathing,” I said.

I won. They begrudgingly admitted I was right.

I did dress up like the Swine Flu, complete with a pig head, at Halloween that year!

At another facility, the Activities Director had a baby. Her husband worked out of town and was away four nights a week. I allowed her to bring the baby to work while she was arraigning daycare.

That little girl had about ten doting babysitters anytime she was in the building.

The point is that there is a special bond between kids and our “seasoned citizens.”

I’m convinced it goes beyond grandparents getting a chance to “do it right this time around.”

It’s much deeper than that. There’s a camaraderie between the newest and the oldest of our society – and I suspect of any society, anywhere in the world, anytime in history.

I’ve have always considered life to be a bell curve. When a person is born we feed them, change their diapers and generally take care of them.

At the end of life ….. well, you see the similarity.

Shel Silverstein illustrated it best. He’s the guy who wrote Johnny Cash’s big hit “A Boy Named Sue.”

But, Shel Silverstein was much more than the writer of novelty songs.
One of my favorites, Silverstein was an author, poet, cartoonist, songwriter and playwright – and a member of the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.

One of his most poignant poems dealt with the relationship between kids and senior citizens.

The Little Boy and The Old Man – by Shel Silverstein

Said the little boy, ‘Sometimes I drop my spoon.’
Said the old man, ‘I do that too.’
The little boy whispered, ‘I wet my pants.’
‘I do that too,’ laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, ‘I often cry.’
The old man nodded, ‘So do I.’
‘But worst of all,’ said the boy, ‘it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.’
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
‘I know what you mean,’ said the little old man.

Thanks, Drew.

Another Bogeyman—the Chinese Farmer

Posted on August 2, 2024 by bpriddy

We don’t know what kind of nonsense folks in other parts of the state have been seeing and hearing in this campaign about the dangers of Chinese ownership of our farmland, but it’s been a central issue in the Third Congressional District television commercials for contenders for Blaine Luetkemeyer’s soon-to-be-vacated seat. It even has oozed into the governor’ race and the state auditor’s race.

China, like the illegal immigrant, is a campaign bogeyman this year. One congressional candidate, Bob Onder, has decided name-calling is a proper way to attack his main competitor, Kurt Schaefer—something that should not be unexpected given that Onder has the full support of Donald Trump, the nation’s leading advocate of character-assassination.

Onder has been sending out direct mail pieces charging “Shanghai Schaefer” with voting to let China have Missouri farmland.

Gubernatorial candidate Mike Kehoe faces the same criticism, without name-calling so far. And incumbent Treasurer Vivek Malik has a commercial that assures us that no state funds are invested in anything Chinese.

Onder and Kehoe’s opponents aren’t shooting straight with the voters. But what else is new in today’s politics? Or politics, ever, for that matter.

Here’s what really went on ten years ago, and more, on which these attack ads are based:

Missouri was among several Midwest states to pass laws in the 1970s that prohibited or restricted foreign land ownership amid concerns over Japanese investment. Missouri law completely banned foreign land ownership until 2013, when lawmakers passed a bill allowing as much as 1% of agricultural land to be sold to foreign entities. The move was an economic necessity to deal with a situation in rural north Missouri.

One of the biggest agricultural issues of the time was Corporate Agriculture, Big Ag, if you will, personified by an outfit called Premium Standard Farms that set up huge contract hog-raising and processing operations in north Missouri, a sparsely-settled part of our state that relied on agriculture for its economy.

Premium Standard revolutionized the pork industry. It had been founded in 1988 with the goal of producing premium pork and was the first pork producer in America to get into vertical integration—in other words, controlling the market from birth of the pig to the marketing of the pig’s parts after it grew up. To accomplish that, PSF bought a lot of land and contracted with many farmers to raise pigs the company would process. North Missouri went from being a region of independent farmers to being suppliers. But Premium Standard offered an economic stability the region had not previously had.

PSF was a huge concern in terms of environmental issues as well as generating concerns about gobbling up small family farms, an anachronistic phrase that had faded from reality many years earlier. It was the second-biggest pork producer and the sixth-biggest pork processor in the country.

In 1999, six people sued for damages, namely odors, coming from PSF’s hog farms. The court ordered PSF to pay then $4.6 million. In 2010, a Jackson County jury gave seven neighboring farmers $11 million in damages because of odors produced on PSF’s 43-hundred acre finishing farm—which processed about 200,000 hogs a year—near Berlin.

By then, Smithfield Foods had bought PSF for $800 million in cash, stock, and assumed debt.

At one time, Smithfield—headquartered in Princeton, Missouri with a processing plant in Milan—ran 132 company-owned farms and had 109 contract farms in Missouri. It also leased farms and eight feed mills.

When China’s biggest pork producer, Shunghui International, wanted to buy Smithfield about five years later, it ran into the state law prohibiting foreign ownership of farm land (several other Midwestern states had adopted similar laws).

As your faithful scribe recalls, the law threatened the purchase as well as the economy of a wide part of north Missouri. So the legislature passed a new law allowing foreign interests to own one percent of Missouri farmland. That cleared the way for Shanghai Holdings, as the United States entity for Shunghui International was known, to take over Smithfield—now known as the WH Group—and the approximately 40,000 acres Smithfield owned. At the time, few people suspected letting foreigners own one percent of Missouri’s farmland would be a major campaign issue or some kind of proclaimed major national security threat.

Senators Kurt Schaefer and Mike Kehoe voted for that bill, which passed the Senate unanimously. Governor Nixon vetoed it. The Republican-dominated legislature overrode the veto.

Schaefer later lost a Republican primary election for Attorney General to Eric Schmitt and has been a lobbyist and Columbia attorney since. Kehoe was appointed Lieutenant Governor by Governor Parson, who sponsored the farmland bill in 2013. Parson is a farmer in southwest Missouri.

The MOST Policy Initiative says Missouri ranks 9^th in the nation in foreign-owned acreage—but the 324,658 acres held amounts to only 0.78% of all of our farmland, ranking us 35^th in that category.

Nationally, we are not under any threat of a foreign government buying our country. The USDA put out a list in 2021 showing how much various countries own of our land. Five countries own two percent of the total land in the United States.

Here’s the top ten as compiled by Forbes:

Canada (12,845,000 acres)
Netherlands (4,875,000)
Italy (2,703,000)
United Kingdom (2,538,000)
Germany (2,269,000)
Portugal (1,483,000)
France (1,316,000)
Denmark (856,000)
Luxembourg (802,000)
Ireland (760,000)

China ranks 18^th on that list with 0.3 million acres.

There is some sentiment today to either reimpose the total limit or cut it back to one-half of one percent. The Center for Strategic Studies has estimated the WH Group now owns more than 146,000 acres of farmland here. Earlier this year, Governor Parson issued an executive order banning companies antagonistic to national security from owning land within ten miles of staffed military sites. No antagonistic foreign entity owns any of that land now.

We don’t know about you, but we don’t plan to vote for candidates who rely on public ignorance of an issue or its history or its significance to level distorted charges against opponents. We’re more likely to vote for a candidate that shoots straight, doesn’t overstate his or her capabilities or the capabilities of the office, who spends less time attacking an opponent and more time outlining a realistic program that benefits the people who will cast votes.

But aiming for the gut is far easier than appealing to the intellect, so don’t expect any break from the fertilizer distribution in the days ahead

Be Thankful

Posted on July 31, 2024 by bpriddy

—that we live in a state that is so safe, so protective of its citizens and their rights, so free from any legal issues linked to our laws, or any uncertainty about people we have put into public office whose behavior is not above the law—

—that we can have a fearless Attorney General who is so bored with the lack of action in his own jurisdiction that he can courageously tell other states what their responsibilities are.

What gives him the authority to stick his nose into other states’ businesses, you might ask? We checked the Missouri Constitution, chapter 27. He is, upon order of the governor, to help local prosecutors with cases, usually those of very serious and complicated natures that are beyond the capability of local prosecutors and their smaller staffs to handle. Local judges also can direct the Attorney General to sign indictments.

He is a legal advisor to the General Assembly who issues advisory opinions on issues before or possibly to be before the legislature. He also is a legal adviser on behalf of the state to Executive Branch officials, elected and appointed “upon any question of law relative to their respective offices or the discharge of their duties.”

The Attorney General defends the state in any appeals to the Missouri Supreme Court or the the State Courts of Appeals.

It is in Section 27.060 we find the words that let our Attorney General meddle in other states’ affairs:

27.060. To represent state in other cases. — The attorney general shall institute, in the name and on the behalf of the state, all civil suits and other proceedings at law or in equity requisite or necessary to protect the rights and interests of the state, and enforce any and all rights, interests or claims against any and all persons, firms or corporations in whatever court or jurisdiction such action may be necessary; and he may also appear and interplead, answer or defend, in any proceeding or tribunal in which the state’s interests are involved.

And that is why, Andrew Bailey—wanting to burnish his credentials as a loyal MAGA-ite—has a way to sue the State of New York, claiming that a jury of Donald Trump’s peers that convicted him of 34 criminal charges a few weeks ago was involved in “unconstitutional lawfare” that is a “direct attack on our democratic process.”

(“Lawfare” is a newly-created phrase designed to manipulate your gut instincts and to malign the honor of those who respect and have built, the American system of justice that has and will protect all of us.)

“It’s time to restore the rule of law,” he righteously proclaims, while using that phrase that is intended to undermine it.

It would be nice if people such as Bailey justified their Trumpist credentials with some original words instead of parroting, more or less, the bloated Trump rhetoric that his trial was “rigged and disgraceful.”

Bailey claims Trump is a victim of a “rogue prosecutor who is trying to take a presidential candidate off the campaign trail” in a way that “sabotages Missourians’ right to a free and fair election.”

One can hope that whatever document he files in this case focuses on the law and spares the judicial system another dose of MAGA hot air.

But if hot air is all he has to offer—-as we have seen in too many filings on behalf of the now-convicted felon—perhaps Missouri voters should consider whether he deserves four years as the state’s lawyer.

We have to recognize what is going on here. What he is part of is a widespread, calculated, grinding attack designed to nationally undermine the legal system he has sworn to uphold, a legal system he might in his younger and more idealistic (and realistic) days have seen as an honorable field of service in a free country.

Does he ever wonder where that younger self has gone? Would any of us ever have thought that our state’s top legal officer now seeks favor from followers of one man whose insatiable hunger for power has proclaimed that he has been egregiously abused because his dreams of dominance and his tactics of intimidation could not sway a mere dozen citizens—people no different from you and me—from meeting their obligations under a two century-old world-respected system of verdicts delivered by the people, of the people, and for the people.

He chooses to hitch his wagon to someone who has no use for such a system unless he can manipulate it to serve himself. The rationalization that is it is being done to preserve a “free and fair election” is a fiction, particularly for the state that has him as its highest legal officer.

To be fair, Bailey’s opponent in next weeks’ primary, Will Scharf, calls himself “Trump’s Attorney,” and has the distinction of having been policy director for the recent lamentable Governor Eric Greitens. He says it’s time for an outsider to be Missouri’s AG. That’s the same thing Greitens proclaimed when he ran for and won the governorship and we remember how well that outsider’s policies went over.

Donald Trump carried Missouri in each of the last two elections and likely will carrying it again this year, despite what a jury in New York has said and despite what state and federal prosecutors accuse him of doing in other places. Nobody has shown that Republicans cannot place Trump’s name on the Missouri ballot in November, so we are able to freely and fairly vote for or against him.

It would be nice if Andrew Bailey and Will Sharf proved they was watching out for our interests as they are watching out for Trump’s.

For instance:

Bailey is the chairman of the Governor’s Crime Commission. Has anybody heard about anything substantial that the commission has done or is doing under his leadership? How is it working to reduce crime throughout Missouri. We haven’t heard a peep about that commission’s work or its record.

He has divided his office into eight divisions: Litigation, Consumer Protection, Governmental Affairs, Environmental Protection, Criminal Appeals, Governmental and Financial Entities, Labor, and Public Safety.

How has he protected us consumers? It had been a long time since we had heard anything about his supervision of the no-call list and prosecutions violators—until we got a pre-primary election brochure in our mail box the other day telling us what a splendid job his office was doing in consumer affairs.

Any companies being sued for shutting down without legally-required notifications of workers and providers? Any polluters being located?

What has he done to protect our environment?

What has his Public Safety Division done to increase your safety and mine?

And Labor—-what does that division do? Is it protecting those who labor?

All of us are left ignorant while Attorney General Bailey makes sure he remains an apple of the MAGA eye with self-aggrandizing huffing about the terrible things a dozen courageous and highly-responsible fellow citizens have done to underline the basic American belief that no one is above the law.

Isn’t it comforting to live in a state with so few problems that our Attorney General has time to meddle in the affairs of other states?

Why am I not therefore comfortable?

Bob Priddy

A journalist's random observations

Author Archives: bpriddy

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Sports: KC, STL Going Opposite Directions; Chiefs Sleight of Hand; And Other Stuff

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The Young and the Old

Another Bogeyman—the Chinese Farmer

Be Thankful

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