COVID-19
BIDEN: “Severe cases are down to a level not seen since July of last year.”
THE FACTS: Biden overstated the improvement, omitting a statistic that remains a worrisome marker of the toll from COVID-19.
While hospitalizations indeed are down from last summer, deaths remain high. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID tracker shows 289 deaths on July 1, 2021. This past Monday the CDC tracker reported 1,985 deaths.
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GUNS
BIDEN, asking Congress to pass measures he said would reduce gun violence: “Repeal the liability shield that makes gun manufacturers the only industry in America that can’t be sued, the only one.”
THE FACTS: That’s false. While gun manufacturers do have legal protections from being held liable for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons thanks to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, they are not exempt or immune from being sued.
The law lays out exceptions where manufacturers or dealers can be held liable for damages their weapons cause, such as defects or damages in the design of the gun, negligence, or breach of contract or warranty regarding the purchase of a gun.
Families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, sued gun maker Remington, alleging “wrongful marketing” of firearms, and last month agreed to a $73 million settlement.
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ECONOMY
BIDEN, promoting his $1 trillion infrastructure law: “We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks. We’re now talking about an infrastructure decade. ... We’ll build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.”
THE FACTS: Not so fast.
The bipartisan legislation approved by Congress ended up providing just half of the $15 billion that Biden had envisioned to fulfill a campaign promise of 500,000 charging stations by 2030. Biden’s Build Back Better proposal aimed to fill the gap by adding back billions to pay for charging stations. But Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., in December declared that bill dead in its present form due to cost. Administration officials now say the infrastructure law will help “pave” the way for up to 500,000 charging outlets by 2030. That’s different than charging stations, which could have several outlets. They say private investments could help fill the gap. Currently there are over 100,000 EV outlets in the U.S. The Transportation Department’s plan asks states to build a nationwide network of EV charging stations that would place new or upgraded ones every 50 miles along interstate highways. The $5 billion in federal money over five years relies on cooperation from sprawling rural communities in the U.S., which are less likely to own EVs due to their typically higher price.
States are expected to start construction as early as fall.
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BIDEN, on Intel’s plans for new factories in central Ohio: “Up to eight state-of-the-art factories in one place, 10,000 new jobs.”
THE FACTS: His statement is premature. That many factories are not imminent and may or may not ever be built. Earlier this year, Intel announced it would open two factories expected to employ 3,000 people. The other 7,000 positions the project is slated to create are temporary construction jobs. It is also planning a chip foundry business that makes chips designed by other firms. Construction is expected to start this year.
Intel has raised the possibility of constructing up to six more factories over the next decade, which could bring the total number of factory workers up to 10,000. But that is only a prospect, years away.
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BIDEN: “The pandemic also disrupted the global supply chain ... Look at cars last year. One third of all the inflation was because of automobile sales. There weren’t enough semiconductors to make all the cars that people wanted to buy. And guess what? Prices of automobiles went way up ... And so we have a choice. One way to fight inflation is to drag down wages and make Americans poorer. I think I have a better idea to fight inflation. Lower your costs and not your wages. Folks, that means make more cars and semi conductors in America. More infrastructure and innovation in America. More goods moving faster and cheaper in America ... Instead of relying on foreign supply chains let’s make it in America.”
THE FACTS: It’s dubious to suggest that more domestic manufacturing means less inflation.
Manufactured products made overseas, particularly in countries such as China or Mexico where wages are lower, are generally cheaper than U.S.-made goods.
Biden also places too much weight on supply chain disruptions from overseas as a factor in the worst inflation in four decades. Although those problems indeed have been a major factor in driving up costs, inflation is increasingly showing up in other areas, such as rents and restaurant meals, that reflect the rapid growth of the economy and wages in the past year and not a global supply bottleneck. Those trends are likely to keep pushing up prices even as supply chains recover.
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INFRASTRUCTURE LAW
BIDEN on the infrastructure bill: “The single biggest investment in history was a bipartisan effort.”
THE FACTS: No, it wasn’t that historic.
Biden’s infrastructure bill was big, adding $550 billion in fresh spending on roads, bridges, and broadband Internet over five years. But measured as a proportion of the U.S. economy, it is slightly below the 1.36% of the nation’s gross domestic product that was spent on infrastructure, on average, during the first four years of the New Deal, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution. It is even further below the roughly 2% spent on infrastructure in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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REPUBLICAN RESPONSE
IOWA GOV. KIM REYNOLDS, criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of immigration and boasting about Republican governors’ attention to the issue: “We’ve actually gone to the border — something that our president and vice president have yet to do since taking office.”
THE FACTS: Not true. Vice President Kamala Harris visited the border last year. Biden hasn’t gone yet.
Harris toured a Customs and Border Protection processing center in El Paso, Texas, and met migrant children there. She also stopped by an intake center on the border and held a discussion with local community organizations.
The half-day trip in June came after months of criticism from Republicans and some in her own party over her absence and that of Biden from the border at a time when immigration officers have logged record numbers of encounters with migrants attempting to cross into the U.S.
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Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Amanda Seitz in Washington, David Klepper in Providence, Rhode Island, John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, and Karena Phan in New York contributed to this report. AP FACT CHECK: Biden's State of Union is off on guns, EVs - CenturyLink
This is what the Washington Free Beacon has to say. Biden Touts Police Funding, Border Security in Rebuke to Democrats. In break with party, Biden says 'our kids need to be in school.'
President Joe Biden, 79, stayed up well past his bedtime on Tuesday to deliver the first State of the Union Address of his faltering presidency. Leading off his speech with the topic on everyone's minds, Biden praised the "pure courage" of Ukrainian citizens in resisting the Russian invasion. Members of Congress from both parties applauded the president's words, careful to make sure that their oversized blue-and-yellow tchotchkes were still visible to the cameras.
Freshly botoxed, forehead smooth and gleaming under the lights, our commander in chief got almost all of his words right when he proclaimed that Vladimir Putin "may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he will never gain the hearts and souls of the Uranian [sic] people." The Russian strongman "has no idea what's coming," Biden Ad-Libbed.
For the first time in history, two women sat behind the president during a State of the Union Address. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) fidgeted like an over-caffeinated chain smoker who couldn't wait to light up as soon as the cameras were off, and Vice President Kamala Harris stared into the distance as if deep in thought, perhaps deciding which staffer to berate after she inevitably embarrasses herself on the Wednesday morning show circuit.
Biden proceeded to change the subject from Ukraine, a largely bipartisan issue, to his controversial domestic agenda, which has already died in Congress and will be even deader after the midterm elections in November. Perhaps due to a plagiarism issue—it wouldn't be the first time—Biden rebranded his "Build Back Better" initiative as "building a better America," before almost coughing his lungs out. He went on to tout policies that even a popular president with a large congressional majority would struggle to pass.
Biden, who boasts a job approval rating of just 40.6 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average, conceded that hardworking Americans were "living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to keep up with their bills" due to inflation. His plan to combat inflation, however, did not inspire confidence. Biden urged businesses to simply "lower costs, not your wages" by manufacturing their products in America and spending more money to fight "climate change." New York Times editor Blake Hounshell was as confused as the rest of us. "It's not clear to me how making more goods in America will make things cheaper, but I guess it's a good applause line," he wrote. (It was, at least for the intended audience of low-information college graduates.)
The Times‘s fact-checkers were similarly unimpressed with Biden's suggestion that the 2017 Republican tax reform bill only benefited "the top 1 percent of Americans." They charitably described the claim as "exaggerated." Biden reiterated his desire to make sure rich people are paying their "fair share," while promising not to raise taxes on the Democratic Party's most influential voting bloc: lawyers, tech bros, and consultants earning up to $400,000 a year. In any event, some wondered: What was the point of promoting all these doomed policies? "I'm having a really hard time caring about Biden laying out a series of policies that will mostly never pass in the midst of arguably the biggest geopolitical crisis in post-Cold War history," wrote Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp. He wasn't alone. Not that any of it really mattered, because most Americans had better things to do than spend an hour watching a tired old man struggle to pronounce "ruble."
Perhaps the most notable aspect of Biden's speech was his stunning rebuke of the Democratic Party. "Our kids need to be in school," he said, in a remarkable shift from his party's longstanding support for making children suffer during the pandemic. When it comes to keeping communities safe, Biden once again attacked his party's preferred policy. "The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police," he said. "Fund them. Fund them." On immigration, he rejected the Democratic Party's bizarre opposition to the concept of borders. "If we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the border," he bellowed.
Biden did not mention the disastrous withdrawal of Afghanistan. Can you blame him? He also didn't discuss his party's obsession with masks. That's because Democrats finally decided it was okay to stop wearing them in front of the cameras, just in time for the speech. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland posted a group selfie with other maskless cabinet members prior to Biden's address. Unlike at Haaland's wedding in November 2021, she and her colleagues weren't in violation of any Democratic-issued mask mandates. More than 540,000 Americans have died from COVID on Biden's watch. He didn't mention that, either.
Eventually Biden stopped talking. "Thank you. Go get him!" he concluded, shouting at no one in particular, as if disoriented. Americans could rest easy, knowing that the state of our union is "[coughing] [incomprehensible]." Biden Touts Police Funding, Border Security in Rebuke to Democrats (freebeacon.com)
That gives us a taste of what he said. Most of which are nothing more than promises likely to never come true. Others are lies, and hypocrisy on several fronts, specifically securing the border and funding the police.
George Burns
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