Ken Paxton makes unfounded claim that Barack Obama used DACA to 'unilaterally confer' citizenship | PolitiFact Texas The lead lawyer for Texas state government hailed President Donald Trump’s rescission of predecessor Barack Obama’s move affording young unauthorized immigrants, sometimes called "Dreamers," renewable shields from deportation. Moreover, Attorney General Ken Paxton charged in a Sept. 5, 2017, press release, Obama "used that lawful-presence dispensation to unilaterally confer U.S. citizenship." A reader asked us to check on that. In his release, Paxton said the program that Trump gave Congress six months to restore granted lawful presence and work permits to nearly a million "unlawfully present aliens." That's close to solid. Yet citizenship wasn’t a declared offering via DACA. Iowa senator touts figures So, what citizenship provision was Paxton talking about? A web search led us to a Sept. 1, 2017, press release from Sen. As of Aug. 21, 2017, Grassley’s release said, 45,447 DACA recipients had been approved for "advance parole" with 3,993 applicants getting applications denied. Our ruling
No Apology, No Explanation: Fox News And The Seth Rich Story Several months after Fox News retracted its story about the death of Seth Rich, the network has done nothing to explain what went wrong. Spencer Platt/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Spencer Platt/Getty Images Several months after Fox News retracted its story about the death of Seth Rich, the network has done nothing to explain what went wrong. On Monday, lawyers for Fox News must submit court filings addressing how the network mishandled a story about the unsolved killing of a young Democratic Party staffer named Seth Rich. Assuming Fox answers those questions in any detail, it would be the first time the network has done so publicly. Fox News was compelled to retract the story, which involved presidential politics, international intrigue and a man's murder. When a story of this scale crumbles, most news organizations feel obligated to explain what happened and why. Not so far at Fox, which stands apart journalistically from its competitors in many ways.
87 Deeply Subversive Documentaries That Challenge the Status Quo By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org/ Jul 19, 2017 Now that there are thousands of films on Films For Action, we realized the very best gems have really become buried all across our library, and for people new to this information, we needed a more guided way to dive in. Spread across 15 core themes, this collection aims to be that entry point. Sadly, you are not likely to see these documentaries in school, broadcast on television, or available on Netflix. Enjoy the knowledge swim! Economics Education Ecology Media Literacy Empire & Government War Drug Prohibition and Prisons Community Food Democracy & Politics Culture Consumerism The Big Picture Wisdom Designing The Future Explore Films For Action's complete library via the Explore menu.
Karen Handel wrongly says Obamacare tax increase largest ever in her lifetime | PolitiFact Georgia Republican lawmakers may have hit a brick wall in their drive to do away with Obamacare, but newly elected U.S. Rep. Karen Handel, R-Ga., stands firm on the need to repeal the health care bill. At a recent telephone town hall, a voter asked why she was not a fan of repairing the Affordable Care Act. "The issue with quote ‘repairing the Affordable Care Act’ is the fact that it has so many taxes in it," Handel said Aug. 30. "In fact, the Affordable Care Act is the single largest tax increase in my lifetime history. A reader asked us if the tax hike in the 2010 health care law was as large as Handel said. Handel was born in 1962, so we looked at the research on every major tax bill passed since then. We reached out to Handel’s office to learn the source behind her statement and did not hear back. We looked at the scale of the Affordable Care Act taxes and found that Handel is mistaken. Jerry Tempalski at the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury Department ran the numbers in 2013. Our ruling
How to outsmart fake news in your Facebook feed It doesn't have to be this way. Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide. 1. Does the story come from a strange URL? Zimdars says sites with strange suffixes like ".co" or ".su," or that are hosted by third party platforms like WordPress should raise a red flag. 2. Mantzarlis says one of the biggest reasons bogus news spreads on Facebook is because people get sucked in by a headline and don't bother to click through. Just this week, several dubious organizations circulated a story about Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. However, the articles themselves didn't contain that quote nor evidence that Pepsi's stock saw a significant drop (it didn't). 3. Sometimes legitimate news stories can be twisted and resurrected years after the fact to create a false conflation of events. A blog called Viral Liberty recently reported that Ford had moved production of some of their trucks from Mexico to Ohio because of Donald Trump's election win. 4. 5.
Block grants would be a disaster. Here’s how we know. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) speaks with reporters. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters) By Peter Edelman By Peter Edelman September 22 at 4:57 PM Peter Edelman is faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality at the Georgetown University Law Center. Republicans are advancing yet another effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act that is as bad as the one defeated in July, if not worse. The Cassidy-Graham bill adds a new coat of paint to the Republican repeal-and-replace effort, but the content is still poison. Those facts should end the discussion. opinions Orlando Shooting Updates News and analysis on the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. post_newsletter348 follow-orlando true after3th false I should know. Republicans say it was a success, but in fact it produced deeper poverty for children and badly spent federal funds. This is what block grants — and their cousin, per-capita caps — do. Block grants can’t respond to changing conditions.
The Equal Protection Challenge to Winner Take All: A Legal Guide Today, the non-profit that I founded, EqualCitizens.US, announced it would crowdfund support for two lawsuits to challenge the way votes are allocated in the Electoral College. All but two states allocate their vote according to a winner-take-all system, in which the winner of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes for that state. We believe winner-take-all violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and we intend, through EqualVotes.US, to build a case (and a campaign) to get the Supreme Court to agree. We’re not the first to have this thought. (I was brought to see it by Sam Issacharoff’s essay; last November, I published a related argument on Medium by Jerry Sims.) (1) What’s the practical problem with the winner-take-all system? Winner-take-all skews the presidential selection process in two critical ways. First, it focuses the attention of presidential campaigns — and hence, candidates — on no more than a dozen “battleground” states. Gray v. We believe Bush v.
No, 30,000 scientists have not said climate change is a hoax Climate change doubters have no patience for claims that the overwhelming number of climate researchers believe that humans are the driving factor. Facebook users flagged a recent article on the website News Punch that asserted much more disagreement in the scientific community than is commonly thought. "30,000 scientists have come forward confirming that man-made climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the elite in order to make money," was the subheadline in the Sept. 2 story. That striking number of dissenting scientists has been around for many years and dates back to a 1998 petition drive conducted under the auspices of a climate change skeptic named Arthur Robinson. Robinson’s Petition Project now counts 31,487 signatories. The petition says nothing about hoaxes or profit motives. On its face, someone signing the petition need not believe that climate change is a hoax, nor that it has been perpetrated to make money. Challenges to the petition These important nuances get lost.
The Honest Truth about Fake News … and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan) | The Lowdown Did you hear that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president? Or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Crazy, right? And … 100 percent false. But if you were one of the millions of people drawn to a bogus headline in your Facebook feed — or other social media platform of choice — and found yourself reading an article on what seemed like a legitimate news site (something like, say, The Political Insider, which “reported” the Clinton-ISIS story), then why wouldn’t you believe it? Welcome to the world of “fake news.” Digital deception It comes as little surprise that the web is chock full of commercial click-bait hoaxes: get-rich-quick schemes, free Caribbean cruises, erectile dysfunction treatments … you name it. But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news. Even President Obama weighed in, assailing the rapid accumulation of fake news as a “dust cloud of nonsense.” Fake news, real profit, serious consequences
The Silent Terrorism on Our Doorsteps The Silent Terrorism on Our Doorsteps (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Let’s begin with two questions. Can you name the location of the two most deadly US mass shootings of 2017? And, can you identify what the two events had in common? The answers? The Sept. 10 killing of eight in Plano, Texas, and the May 27 killing of eight in Bogue Chitto, Mississippi. Were the mass murders covered by portions of the US media? It is for this reason that I reacted on Twitter to heavy US media coverage of the Sept. 15 Parsons Green tube bomb in London. Nine out of 10 victims knew their offenders. A study released this week by the Violence Policy Center (using data from the FBI) found that in 2015 there were 1,686 women murdered by men in “single victim/single offender” incidents. “Women killed by men are most often killed by someone they know and more than half were killed by an intimate partner,” says the Violence Policy Center’s Legislative Director Kristen Rand. Journalism is all about choices.
Joe Biden Just Chose a Side in the Universal Basic Income Debate In Brief Former Vice President Joe Biden has just taken a side in the Universal Basic Income debate — and with his take on preparing for the future, he's betting against some of the biggest innovators in Silicon Valley. Biden Won’t Back UBI Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a economic safety net system in which everyone — regardless of their age, employment status, economic status, household size, or other factors — is guaranteed a minimum income. Sam Altman, the President of Y Combinator, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Stewart Butterfield of Slack and Flickr, Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are just some of the big names who have publicly supported UBI. “Our children and grandchildren deserve the promise we’ve had: the skills to get ahead, the chance to earn a paycheck, and a steady job that rewards hard work,” Biden wrote in a Biden Institute blog post. UBI and the Future
Any Hit To Medicaid Would Take A Broad Swipe Across The U.S. Protesters rally against Medicaid cuts in front of the U.S. Capitol in June. Medicaid is the nation's largest health insurance program, covering 74 million people — more than 1 in 5 Americans. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images Protesters rally against Medicaid cuts in front of the U.S. When high levels of lead were discovered in the public water system in Flint, Mich., in 2015, Medicaid stepped in to help thousands of children get tested for poisoning and receive care. When disabled children need to get to doctor's appointments — either across town or hundreds of miles away — Medicaid pays for their transportation. When older middle-class Americans deplete their savings to pay for costly nursing home care, Medicaid offers coverage. The United States has become a Medicaid nation. Although it started as a plan to cover only the poor, Medicaid now touches tens of millions of Americans who live above the poverty line.
Prolific fake news writer Paul Horner dead at 38 Professional hoaxster Paul Horner, who made a name for himself as a satirist and fake news impresario years before it became a focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, has died. The Arizona Republic reported on Sept. 26, 2017, that Horner, 38, died in Laveen, Ariz., on Sept. 18. The Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner confirmed to PolitiFact that the agency was investigating Horner’s death, but that final reports can take 3 to 6 months to complete. Horner ran a string of websites that often looked deceptively like mainstream news organizations. Formerly a writer at fake news site NationalReport.net, Horner is credited with authoring stories ranging from Bill Murray running for president to President Barack Obama opening a Muslim museum to Banksy getting arrested. We mentioned Horner specifically when we named Fake News our 2016 Lie of the Year. His stories also used the name Paul Horner as a source, or made some reference to an individual with that name.
There’s a disaster much worse than Texas. But no one talks about it A quick quiz. No Googling, no conferring, but off the top of your head: what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian disaster? If you nominated storm Harvey and the flooding of Houston, in Texas, then don’t be too hard on yourself. Media coverage of that disaster has been intense, and the pictures dramatic. As it happens, Harvey has killed an estimated 44 Texans and forced some 32,000 into shelters since it struck, a week ago. That there is a disparity in the global attention paid to these two natural disasters is hardly a novelty. Most of this amounts to a pretty basic form of racism to which, lord knows, the media are far from immune; perhaps Eurocentrism would be more accurate. Still, blaming the media is the easy option here. The media deserve to be attacked for the discrimination they have shown this week. But I’ve not yet given an answer to my quiz question. The scale of the suffering in the Arab world’s poorest country is clear. After Iraq, that changed.