President Biden Has Announced He Is Running For Re-election

Why would an 80-year-old man run for President? He has obviously lost some of his mental abilities, and he is not likely to regain them. On Tuesday, Townhall posted a fact check of President Biden’s announcement that he was running for President in 2024. The announcement was in video form–it was not live, which in itself is curious.

In the video, the President noted:

“The question we are facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer,” the 80-year-old stated. “I know what I want the answer to be. This is not a time to be complacent. That’s why I’m running for reelection.”

The article notes:

As Katie pointed out, vaccine-obsessed Biden, the so-called leader of the free world, issued a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers, ordering that all employees were required to get vaxxed against the coronavirus or be subject to disciplinary action, which included termination. Likewise, in an affront to individual autonomy and those bravely fighting for America’s freedom, Biden imposed a military-wide vaccine mandate, causing thousands of U.S. military personnel to have been discharged or sidelined for refusing the jab. Biden’s administration also sought to enforce a draconian vaccine-or-test mandate on private businesses through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but the move was deemed illegal.

The article also notes:

Attacking GOP leadership, Biden claimed, “But you know, around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take those bedrock freedoms away,” which the octogenarian alleged included “cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life.”

Townhall previously debunked this oft-repeated claim that Biden regurgitates in office and on the 2024 campaign trail. The majority of conservative lawmakers aren’t on board with sunsetting Social Security and Medicare as Republican top brass has repeatedly declared that mainstream GOP members have no intention of ending these generations-old federal entitlements.

…Moments after the false Social Security claim, Biden alleged that “MAGA extremists” across America are “banning books.”

Please follow the link to the article for further details. I really can’t believe that anyone believes President Biden is capable of being President until 2028. I do wonder exactly what the Democrats are setting up.

Lying Or Simply Not Knowing?

On Thursday, The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about a recent speech by President Biden.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden touted U.S. manufacturing gains Thursday on a trip to Syracuse – where he claimed gas prices were down compared to when he took office, when in fact they are higher.

‘We’re down $1.25 Since the peak this summer, and they’ve been falling for the last three weeks as well as well, and adding up real savings for families today.,’ Biden said. 

‘The most common price of gas in America is $3.39 down from over $5 When I took office,’ he continued.

The average cost of a gallon of gas on the AAA site was $3.76 Thursday. When he took office, it was averaging $2.39 – or about half what he said it was then – according to the Energy Information Institute.

President Biden has a very shaky relationship with the truth. Remember how the political left was always accusing President Trump of lying? Somehow that hasn’t happened to President Biden, even when he is lying.

Yahoo News recently fact-checked another of President Biden’s statements:

Joe Biden: “wages have gone up higher, faster than inflation”

PolitiFact’s ruling: Mostly false

Here’s why: President Joe Biden defended his record on the U.S. economy while attending the international climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Biden entered the United Nations’ COP 26 summit facing supply chain challenges and high levels of inflation back home. At a press conference, he said the U.S. is still in a better place than a year ago, when the coronavirus pandemic limited family gatherings and hampered the economy.

“This Thanksgiving, we’re all in a very different circumstance,” Biden said on Nov. 2. “Things are a hell of a lot better, and the wages have gone up higher, faster than inflation.”

On inflation and wages, Biden has a point for the most recent two months — August and September 2021. However, inflation outpaced wages by so much earlier in his presidency that these two months haven’t changed the overall picture much. All told, Americans are worse off on the comparison of inflation and wages than they were roughly a year ago. (The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.)

At least someone is noticing the lies.

Something Isn’t Quite Right

Hot Air posted an article today about some rather mundane fact-checking done by the U.K. Daily Mail. What they fact-checked was somewhat insignificant, but maybe it wasn’t.

Hot Air reports:

This may not be the biggest breaking political news story of the year, but it’s certainly a strange tale that might give you pause when it comes to the question of precisely how well President Joe Biden’s memory is doing these days. The Daily Mail was among several outlets that decided to do some fact-checking of a speech that Uncle Joe gave in Philadelphia last Friday. They weren’t looking at any of his policy claims regarding the border crisis or the pandemic or anything else that’s been occupying our attention lately, however. Biden regaled the audience with one of his famous anecdotes from his long political career. As we all know, Biden prided himself on his regular train trips back and forth between Delaware and Washington, mixing in with the common folk and being a regular guy taking public transit. But in this story, Biden gave some specifics. He talked about a time during his fourth or fifth year as Vice President when a train conductor congratulated him on reaching 1.5 million miles on Amtrak while he was traveling to visit his sick mother. It’s one of those heartwarming stories of a regular American guy doing regular American things. But there were two problems with his story. First of all, the conductor he named had retired twenty years before that and his mother had passed away at least four years earlier.

The article concludes:

Just how well is Joe Biden holding it all together these days? He rarely holds any lengthy Q&A sessions with the press or publicly engages in unscripted exchanges on camera. He generally sticks to prepared speeches and has a lengthy set of notes on the lectern when making public addresses. How is he doing when he’s in private meetings or on phone calls with foreign leaders or the top ranks of our military?

I’m not saying this is some sort of end of the world scenario. After all, we made it through Ronald Reagan’s second term without even learning that he was fighting Alzheimer’s at the time. As long as Joe Biden has trusted staffers at his side at all times I suppose things will work out in the end. But these traits should really be taken into consideration before Joe Biden makes a decision about possibly running for a second term. We’ve still got more than three and a half years to go on this term and it could turn out to be a bumpy ride.

At this point, many of us are wondering who is actually running the country.

The Washington Post Fact Checker Gets It Right

On September 4th, The Washington Post posted an article checking the veracity of one of the statements the Biden campaign is making about President Trump. The statement has been made often enough that I see it frequently posted by my friends on Facebook.

The article reports:

“The chief actuary of the Social Security Administration just released an analysis of Trump’s planned cuts to Social Security. Under Trump’s plan, Social Security would become permanently depleted by the middle of calendar year 2023. If Trump gets his way, Social Security benefits will run out in just three years from now. Don’t let it happen. Joe Biden will protect Social Security.”

— Voice-over in a new ad by Joe Biden, “Depleted,” released Sept. 3

Without fail during a tough election season, Democrats bring up Social Security. The ads are often ubiquitous in states with high percentages of senior citizens who rely on Social Security as their main source of income.

Trump gets mentioned in this ad three times. But there is no such Trump plan.

The article explains the false basis for the claim:

The president gave the Democrats an opening with a series of confusing remarks after he signed an executive order that would suspend the payment of payroll taxes until the end of the year.

The executive order would halt collection of the 6.2 percent payroll tax imposed on wages for Social Security, starting Sept. 1. In theory, taxpayers would still be liable for the taxes at a later date, but the executive order says “the Secretary of the Treasury shall explore avenues, including legislation, to eliminate the obligation to pay the taxes deferred pursuant to the implementation of this memorandum.”

While the Trump White House has suggested this is similar to a payroll tax holiday in the Obama administration during the Great Recession, that law had a provision saying Social Security would be made whole with transfers from general funds (regular tax revenue). This executive order does not say that, but one would presume that any forgiveness would be accompanied by such transfers.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It details exactly what is being said and what has been said. Just for the record, Congress has been raiding Social Security since the 1960’s.

 

 

 

 

I Totally Don’t Understand This

Yesterday Breitbart News reported a puzzling comment by House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat. Representative Clyburn was being interviewed on Fox Business Network by Neil Cavuto. The article includes part of the transcript of that interview.

The article reports:

NEIL CAVUTO: As you’ve been seeing with Michael Bloomberg, he’s been jumping in the polls on the heels of his very expensive, pricey ad buys if you include $125 million slated for Super Tuesday. Could you, would you back him?

REP. JAMES CLYBURN: I’m going to back whoever our nominee is — Absolutely.

CAVUTO: Even with the things he’s said about African-Americans? Does that bother you?

REP. CLYBURN: Not as much as what Trump has said about African-Americans. Anytime that I go to the polls, I’m considering positives and negatives on all candidates and I try to go with the one whose positives outweigh the negatives.

CAVUTO: Let’s leave the words aside, whether you like his style or not, tweets or not, or comments or not, he’s delivered the goods for a lot of African-Americans. Does he not with record-low unemployment levels?… You don’t think that’s something that’s constructive?

REP. CLYBURN: No, because it’s not true. I’m saying that the African American unemployment is not the lowest it’s ever been unless you count slavery… We were fully employed during slavery. So, it all depends how you measure this up.

This is how blind hatred affects judgement.

On February 7, 2020, CNS News reported:

Trump loves to boast and exaggerate, so it’s easy to throw out little “Pinocchio” ratings when Trump claims we have the lowest black unemployment rate in American history, since it’s only been measured since 1972. But it’s literally the lowest ever measured in American history. What the fact-checkers are doing is littering achievements with asterisks, trying to distract from the undeniable fact that unemployment is at record lows for blacks, Hispanics, women, the disabled and undoubtedly other groups Democrats claim to champion.

This is the link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website page that has all of the unemployment statistics. You can explore that page for pure numbers. We should all celebrate the fact that the Trump economy has been good to all Americans of all backgrounds.

The Biggest Lie Told In Last Night’s Debate

Breitbart posted an article last night which detailed the biggest lie told in the Democratic debate in Iowa.

The article reports:

Blue-collar and white-collar Americans “are being clobbered, they’re being killed,” former Vice President Joe Biden claimed at the January 14 Democrat debate in Iowa.

However, unemployment is at record lows, many sidelined Americans are getting jobs, and blue-collar wages are rising at rates not seen for many years amid President Donald Trump’s new curbs on legal and illegal immigration.

The article quotes Joe Biden’s remarks:

Working-class people — where I come from in Pennsylvania, the places I come from in Delaware — I have great support. I have support across the board, and I’m not worried about taking on Donald Trump at all. And with regard to the economy I can hardly wait to have a debate with him.

Where I come from — the neighborhoods I come from — they’re in real trouble: working-class people and middle-class people. When the middle class does well, [the] working class has a way up and the wealthy do well. But what’s happening now: they’re being clobbered, they’re being killed. They now have a situation where they [believe] — the vast majority believe — their children will never reach the stage that they reached in economic security.

I love that [economic] debate because the American public is getting clobbered. The wealthy are the only ones doing well. Period. I’m looking forward to the economic debate.

The article reports the facts:

Wages for blue-collar Americans rose by 4.3 percent in 2019 — or 2.7 percent after inflation — in President Donald Trump’s tightening labor market, according to a December report by Goldman Sachs.

The wage gains come amid very low inflation of just 2.1 percent in December.

…Blue-collar wages are rising faster than white-collar salaries because of different demands from employers, said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “White-collar wages have been moving up over time, a bit, and the demand there, because of technology and other things, is not as high as the demand [for blue-collar skills]. … It’s a reality of the market,” he said January 9.

But Biden wants to increase the flow of foreign workers who will reduce wages for Americans.

“Biden will work with Congress to first reform temporary visas to establish a wage-based allocation process and establish enforcement mechanisms to ensure they are aligned with the labor market and not used to undermine wages,” said Biden’s plan for legal immigration. “Then, Biden will support expanding the number of high-skilled visas and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country, which create unacceptably long backlogs,” the plan says.

Hopefully enough Americans are familiar with the actual facts to believe this garbage.

If You Haven’t Become Somewhat Skeptical About News Photos, You’re Not Paying Attention

The Washington Examiner posted an article today about some recent film aired by ABC News that was described as ‘slaughter in Syria.’ There was only one problem. It seems that the film footage was actually from a nighttime machine gun demonstration at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky. We’ve seen this sort of propaganda before, but it usually comes from middle eastern news sources (as in this instance).

The article in The Washington Examiner reports:

After seeing a comment from Wojciech Pawelczyk, I began making some calls. As of this writing, it appears ABC indeed aired footage recorded in the Kentucky and claimed it was from Syria. The network has since pulled the video.

“We’ve taken down video that aired on World News Tonight Sunday and Good Morning America this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy,” a network representative told the Washington Examiner. “ABC News regrets the error.”

A representative for the gun range also told the Washington Examiner that they are still investigating ABC’s reporting, adding further that the images aired by the network “look to be” from their Kentucky property.

“As of right now,” the representative added, “it seems to be our footage.”

Note that the sequence and shape of explosions is identical in the following ABC and Kentucky videos, as are some of the features of the terrain amid the explosions. But we might actually be dealing with two different videos of the same Kentucky live-fire event from slightly different angles. In the independent film of the live-fire event in Kentucky, you can clearly see taller objects in the foreground that seem to appear as silhouettes in the ABC footage:

The article concludes:

Earlier, on Sunday, ABC News anchor Tom Llamas also aired the allegedly shocking footage, claiming it showed a fierce Turkish attack on Kurd civilians.

“The situation rapidly spiraling out of control in northern Syria. One week since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against [the Islamic State],” he said.

Llamas then described the video as it aired on-screen.

“This video right here appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the U.S. against ISIS. Now, horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies,” he added.

The intro to the show he anchored,ABC World News Tonight, also claimed of the footage: “A border town, bombarded by Turkey’s military!”

The footage would indeed be stunning were if actually from northern Syria. It would be horrific were it actually to show a Turkish assault on Kurd civilians. But it does not show that. The footage, which appears to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for an audience in Kentucky. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which involves the very popular night shoot, is a bi-annual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they record it and post footage of it to social media. …

It is astonishing that ABC appears to have aired Kentucky gun range footage during prime-time news segments on the clashes in Syria and that no one at the network — not a producer, not a fact-checker, and certainly not an on-air personality — caught the errors before they aired.

When the mainstream media has a narrative, they will use whatever resources they can to promote that narrative. Don’t believe anything you currently see in the mainstream media. They are not interested in reporting accurate news–they are interested in remaking America into something that would negatively impact the lives of everyday Americans.

 

Fact-Checking The Lies

I really hate being lied to. I also hate it when a source that should be reliable lies to me in order to convince me to take a stand on an issue. Unfortunately that has become a way of life for some of the mainstream media. The latest example illustrates that there might be some panic associated with having an attorney general who believes in the rule of law involved in the Epstein case.

The Gateway Pundit reported today:

The Fake News Liberal Media claimed that AG Bill Barr’s father worked with Jeffrey Epstein as a school teacher and therefore AG Barr should recuse himself from the Epstein case.  Of course, it’s just another liberal lie.

The article then goes on to report the actual facts:

The fake news New York Times reported in February 1974 that Bill Barr’s father had resigned from the elite school

…The far left Daily Beast reported that Epstein did work at the school but he didn’t work there until after the summer of 1974 –

 

 AG Bill Barr’s father couldn’t have worked with Epstein at Dalton School because he wasn’t even there when Epstein worked there.  He resigned months earlier.

So I guess there is no reason for Attorney General Barr to recuse himself. But how many people are mistakenly going to believe what they heard on the news? This sort of reporting is a threat to our republic–misinformed voters can be manipulated to vote any way a dishonest media wants them to vote.

Facts Are Such Inconvenient Things

The biggest advantage the Republicans will have in 2020 is a strong economy. Because the Democrats know this, they are trying very hard to downplay the economic recovery that is currently taking place. They have invented some interesting facts in their attempt to do this. However, the alternative media has learned to fact check these attempts to downplay President Trump’s economic success.

Townhall posted an article today that includes some recent fact checking.

The article reports on some recent statement by Kamala Harris:

First, I’m not sure many economists or Republicans cite the stock market as the top indicator of economic health, despite her initial straw man claim. There are many other metrics that are more indicative and more helpful to building that argument, which we’ll mention in a moment.  But it’s also worth pointing out that a robust stock market is not merely good news for people who own stocks, as Harris sarcastically says.  Plenty of workers’ benefit and retirement funds, including those of many public sector employees, are tied into the performance of the stock market — so it’s not just investors who benefit when markets are humming along, and it’s not just investors who feel pain when markets sustain hits. 

Second, in her attempt to downplay the impressive, stable and low US unemployment rate, Harris recycles a claim for which AOC was slapped down by fact-checkers a few months ago.  Even left-leaning Politifact assigned her a “pants on fire” rating.  Harris’ spin is less explicitly clumsy and wrong than AOC’s, as she didn’t specifically state that the low rate is directly attributable to people working more than one job, which makes absolutely no sense — but she does use this argument to undercut the (compelling) argument that the economy is in good shape because so many Americans are employed.  While it’s certainly true that a substantial number of people are working multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, it’s not accurate to pretend that this phenomenon is sufficiently widespread as to justify Harris’ talking point.

The article further reports:

The February jobs report found that just five percent of the employed population is working more than one job, down from 5.2 percent one year ago.  The experiences of the people who constitute that five percent matter, of course, but they are not evidence of a larger trend — and certainly not a trend that represents a real basis to shrug off the historically-low unemployment rate.  The jobs report that came out on Friday was a major ‘miss’ on a key number, with the US economy adding only 20,000 jobs last month; economists were expecting 180,000.  That’s a potentially concerning data point, underscoring the folly of simply assuming that the current prosperity streak will continue unabated.  But there were positive statistics, too.  The previous two months’ job creation data was revised upward by 12,000, and the overall unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent.  That marks 12 consecutive months, a full year, with the U3 figure at or below four percent, which is unambiguously good.

The article concludes:

Sustainability is a fair worry for the White House, but as of this moment, the most useful measuring sticks of the US economy are unemployment (3.8 percent), GDP growth (3.1 percent Q4 to Q4), and wage growth (3.4 percent).  All three are impressive.  Harris’ snarky point, therefore, is weak.  

As wages and jobs increase, voters will have to decide whether to believe what they are experiencing or what they are being told.