FAIR: How Corporate Media 'Factchecked' Biden’s Calls for Social Security Cuts Into Oblivion

View article on FAIR's website How Corporate Media 'Factchecked' Biden’s Calls for Social Security Cuts Into Oblivion Joshua Cho   Throughout this election cycle, FAIR has documented how corporate media view it as their mission to protect the status quo and corporate profits by lauding centrist and right-wing Democrats like Joe Biden, as well as serving as an anti-Bernie Sanders attack machine. It seems the latest tactic in corporate media’s  crusade to undermine the Sanders campaign—and the progressive movement supporting him—is to bleed them dry with disingenuous “factchecks,” serving as a form of death by a thousand nuances. At the start of the Democratic primaries, the Sanders campaign utilized Biden’s long history of supporting cuts to popular entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security to devastating effect, so it’s no surprise that corporate media worked overtime to nullify one of the Sanders campaign’s strongest arguments. On the campaign trail and in the latest CNN debate, Biden himself used these corporate media “factchecks” to discredit Sanders’ accurate attacks on his record: My Lord, Bernie. You’re running an ad saying I’m opposed to Social Security that PolitiFact said is a flat lie and that the Washington Post said is a flat lie. Politifact (3/12/20): "The reality is that Biden’s position has changed over time." PolitiFact stands out for its extreme parsing of details to distort reality. Before the March 15 debate, Politifact (3/12/20) rated Sanders’ claim that Biden “has supported cutting Social Security for 40 years” as “Mostly False,” because the “record is much more nuanced than that,” stating that it’s more accurate to describe Biden’s position as having “changed over time.” As part of its denial of Sanders’ claim, Politifact itself listed numerous instances in the past 40 years when Biden has advocated cuts to Social Security: “In 1984, Biden co-sponsored a proposal with two GOP senators to broadly freeze federal spending. The proposal would have meant no Social Security cost-of-living adjustments for one year.” “In 1996, Biden suggested cutting the cost-of-living adjustment by one percentage point.” “When he ran for president in 2007, in an interview with NBC, Biden said the retirement age and cost-of-living adjustments had to ‘be on the table’ in negotiations on stabilizing Social Security.” Politifact seemed to be disputing Sanders’ claim because it doesn’t reflect Biden’s current position, as though there would be any point running ads pointing out Biden’s former stances on Social Security if they weren’t inconsistent with what he espouses now. Politifact’s rating also neglects how language is conventionally used. For example, no one would find it unreasonable for me to claim that I lived at a certain address for ten years, even if I also spent several weeks away from home on vacation at multiple points during that time period. Likewise, just because Biden frequently changes his positions, and has occasionally expressed opposition to cutting a highly popular social program when it suited him, doesn’t mean that a “plain reading” of Sanders’ claim about Biden having supported Social Security cuts over 40 years isn’t true. After the CNN debate, Politifact continued its role as a PR surrogate for the Biden campaign with its latest factcheck (3/15/20) holding that Sanders’ statements were not only wrong, but also dishonest. Politifact criticized Sanders’ remarks for leaving out “context,” and ignoring “Biden’s subsequent positions in opposition to such cuts.” Astonishingly, Politifact asserted that “Biden’s focus has changed to protecting Social Security from cuts since he became vice president in 2009.” That would be news to anyone who remembers the Obama administration famously pursuing a bipartisan “grand bargain” with Republicans to cut Social Security under the pretext of “deficit reduction,” most notoriously through the Simpson/Bowles Commission (Intercept, 1/25/20; FAIR.org, 5/21/12; Extra!, 6/1/16). I earlier (FAIR.org, 1/22/20) criticized Politifact’s obtuse attempt (1/9/20) to echo the Biden campaign’s dismissal of his 2018 praise for Paul Ryan’s attempts to cut Social Security as “sarcastic,” thus rendering Sanders’ criticism “False,” and for failing to highlight Biden’s very next words claiming that Social Security/Medicare needed “adjustments”: FAIR (2/4/15, 6/25/19) has noted that euphemisms like “solution” and “adjustments” are frequently used to describe what are more accurately called cuts to Social Security. As Ryan Grim noted on Twitter (1/9/20), “‘Adjustment,’ in Washington, is a euphemism for ‘cuts.’ That’s just a basic fact of congressional lingo that can’t be disputed.” Particularly when Biden says of the retirement programs, “It still needs adjustment, but can stay,” it’s hard to see how you can read it other than as a call to “save” the programs by cutting them. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic (1/22/20) pointed out the absurdity of corporate media’s attempts to spin away the straightforward interpretation of Biden’s remarks: Watch the video for yourself, read the transcript, or read any of the fine journalists who have taken on the tedious task of explaining Biden’s 2018 words for those mysteriously struggling with basic reading comprehension. If Biden was truly being “sarcastic” about agreeing with Paul Ryan, why would his next sentence hint at the desirability of means-testing Social Security (“I don’t know a whole lot of people in the top one-tenth of 1% or the top 1% relying on Social Security when they retire”)? Why would he repeat, moments later, in a tone that cannot remotely be construed as “mocking” or “sarcastic,” that these major entitlements “still needs [sic] adjustments” to “stay”? The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler (3/8/20) says it's "misleading" for Sanders to criticize Biden for supporting an increase in the retirement age because "this was not a controversial position at the time." You’ll remember the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler as the “factchecker” who claimed that Sanders’ saying three oligarchs had more wealth than the bottom half of the US was wrong because “people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth, as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have” (The Nation, 9/3/19). Kessler (3/8/20) continued in that vein by asserting that Sanders “offers a misleading portrayal” and is “missing important context,” because Biden’s attempts to cut Social Security through the “raising the retirement age” scam in the 1980s was “not a controversial position at the time.” It’s “misleading” to claim that Biden wanted to cut Social Security since both Democrats and Republicans wanted to cut Social Security, as both parties bought into the austerity mindset during the Reagan era (as they still do). Makes sense. Kessler also lambasted Sanders’ criticism of Biden’s attempts to cut Social Security by freezing all government spending as misleading because it “was not aimed at Social Security specifically.” This resembles the obtuse logic behind corporate media’s euphemistic descriptions of racist actions and policies as “racially charged” or “race-related” if perpetrators don’t explicitly announce they’re trying to harm people of color: So long as deficit scolds like Biden don’t specifically target and denounce Social Security when they try to cut it, it’s “misleading” to say they tried to cut it. Kessler also treated Sanders’ accurate description of the “chained CPI” scam as a way to cut Social Security as a he-said, she-said situation, even though Kessler admitted that calculating increases in the costs of living through chained CPI would result in benefits for Social Security growing at “a slower rate” than the traditional CPI. That would be more clearly and concisely described as a “cut.” Setting aside the ridiculous logic of arguing that it’s inaccurate to claim Biden was trying to cut Social Security because he was merely supporting austerity in general, it’s simply silly to pretend Social Security has anything to do with the deficit, or that there are no alternatives to “saving” Social Security besides cutting it. Not only are there simple solutions to increase Social Security’s solvency that don’t require reducing benefits (like scrapping the payroll cap), but as Dean Baker pointed out, Social Security is a self-financed program, which would draw on its trust fund if it’s unable to pay out full benefits collected through payroll taxes, and would reduce benefits—rather than contribute to the national debt—if the trust fund were allowed to run out. In this, Kessler not only misses the forest, but also the trees. AP (1/29/20) painted Sanders as a hypocrite because he too had said Social Security may need "adjustments"—without mentioning that he offered as an example "making the tax system more progressive." Epitomizing false balance, Kessler’s factcheck also echoed the Associated Press’s earlier factcheck (1/29/20) that tried to paint Sanders as a hypocrite by noting Sanders’ use of the term “adjustments” in a 1996 op-ed that ran in the Burlington Free Press (10/23/96). Although CNN also borrowed from the AP’s factcheck when it asked Sanders about his 1996 op-ed during the most recent debate (3/15/20), even CNN’s problematic factcheck (3/15/20) acknowledged that the op-ed explicitly “opposed proposed cuts by the Republican-led Congress to entitlement programs,” and that 1997 op-eds and press releases made clear that Sanders “opposed any cuts to Social Security,” and that the “adjustment” Sanders had in mind was “making the tax system more progressive.” Although Kessler derided Sanders for criticizing Biden for “supporting a deal that Sanders himself had praised” during a 1999 press conference referencing bipartisan Social Security cuts in 1983, the executive director of Social Security Works, Alex Lawson, argued that any attempt to frame Biden and Sanders’ record on Social Security as similar is misleading. While it was a mistake for Sanders to have used the ambiguous term “adjustments” in 1996, in 1997, Sanders called for “adjusting” the “artificial ceiling” on the payroll cap so that the wealthy could contribute more towards the program, and sponsored bills to block cuts and expand benefits throughout the ’90s and his entire career. The Post’s post-debate “factcheck” (3/15/20) of Sanders’ criticisms continued its hand-wringing over details by claiming that “Sanders’s point rests on how one defines a ‘cut.’” If the Post acknowledged that freezing spending would make those funds “worth less” because of inflation, why not just call them “cuts” to Social Security, rather than offering pedantic quibbles like “Technically that’s not a reduction”? Whatever clever dodges politicians propose for cutting Social Security, whether through “raising the retirement age,” “chained CPI” or “freezing” spending, it’s important for media outlets to cut through the jargon and inform citizens by accurately labeling what they want to impose on the US’s most successful anti-poverty program: cuts.  Otherwise, these “guides” to Social Security debates should be understood by readers as apologies for austerity (Extra!, 5/99). © 2020 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.  Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting Our mailing address is: FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING 124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201 New York, NY 10001 FAIR's Website FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today

Guests at Trump National Golf Club disco party get coronavirus

JOE BIDEN IS DELUSIONAL!

WHO BELIEVES BIDEN'S DELUSIONS WON'T BE IN tRUMPER'S CAMPAIGN ADS?

THE CORRUPT CORPORATE DNC PROMOTED AND SUPPORTED THIS CLOWN, IGNORING HIS HISTORY & COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENTS.

JILL thinks she can be another Nancy Reagan...think again!

Joe Biden told a group of supporters during a virtual town hall that he worked as an Ivy League professor when he left the Senate. In 2017, the University of Pennsylvania gave Biden an honorary title.

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dailymail.co.uk

Biden says he 'became a professor' at an Ivy League school

Joe Biden told a group of supporters during a virtual town hall that he…

Joe Biden told a group of supporters during a virtual town

Joe Biden, 77, claims he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania after leaving the Senate, despite the title being honorary and the ex-VP apparently never teaching a class

• During a virtual town hall, Joe Biden suggested that he worked as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania  
• 'When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,' Biden told a group of young people
• In 2017, Biden received the honorary title of 'Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor' from the University of Pennsylvania 
• That same year, Biden spokesperson Kate Bedingfield told the Daily Pennsylvanian, 'He will not be teaching classes'
• Biden also told a group of supporters at a campaign event in February that he was a professor 
  

JOE BIDEN CAN'T TELL FACT FROM HIS DELUSIONS....HAS TOLD SO MANY LIES, CHECK THE LINK FOR THE VIDEO. 

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MONEY doesn't create immunity! HOW MANY PEOPLE DID THESE PRIVILEGED VAMPIRES INFECT?

"...Hahn said she arrived determined not to shake hands, tap toes or bump fists or elbows with anyone. But she recalled a blasé attitude among other revelers: They passed around a single microphone to toast Brooks, and seemed to go out of their way to flout admonishments from public health officials against shaking hands and hugging, Hahn said.

“It was, ‘Oh, this is media pollution, you’re overblowing this,’” she recalled. “I remember going home that night feeling a little bit ashamed.”

A week later, Brooks’ guests got another email. This one began, “Urgent Message.” A party-goer had tested positive for COVID-19. Five people who attended the party have tested positive, including Brooks, according to her daughter. Another 10 people have reported feeling ill but have not been tested, she said...."

Cape Cod Women for Change

Democratic Hoax. update to this story- as of last night 17 guests test positive.

There was also, it turns out, the virus itself. Brooks learned a week later a party-goer had tested positive for COVID-19, the infection caused by the coronavirus. She soon tested positive herself, along with three other guests.

 On a Sunday evening two weeks and an eternity ago, Susan Brooks rang in her seventh decade, disco style, in the upstairs ballroom at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes. 

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msn.com

Guests at Trump National Golf Club disco party get coronavirus

 On a Sunday evening two weeks and an eternity ago, Susan B

LOS ANGELES — On a Sunday evening two weeks and an eternity ago, Susan Brooks rang in her seventh decade, disco style, in the upstairs ballroom at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes.

There were local politicos, hors d’oeuvres, dancing and a lingering, if not overriding, worry of the novel coronavirus, which on March 8 had yet to paralyze daily life in Southern California.

Bing COVID-19 tracker: Latest numbers by country and state 

There was also, it turns out, the virus itself. Brooks learned a week later a party-goer had tested positive for COVID-19, the infection caused by the coronavirus. She soon tested positive herself, along with three other guests.

The party, which was first reported by the South Bay-based Easy Reader News, has sparked a minor firestorm in Rancho Palos Verdes, where Brooks is a fixture in local politics and was once the city’s mayor.

It underscores that in a pandemic, certain motions of daily life no more extraordinary and no less cherished than a birthday party can turn perilous, seeding a crowd with a sickness that blooms as the party breaks up, carrying it home, to work — everywhere.

Brooks referred questions to her daughter, Meredith Brooks, who said they followed the advice that public health officials had issued at the time, telling guests to stay home if they showed any signs of being ill. She stressed that Southern California now — businesses shuttered, residents under a stay-at-home advisory, “social distancing” embedded in the lexicon — is a far different world from the one in which she celebrated her mother’s birthday two weeks ago.

“Weddings were going on that weekend,” she said. “Parties were going on that weekend. Life was going on as normal — it was the last normal weekend we had, but it was a normal weekend.”

Two days before the party, Susan Brooks had asked her friend, Janice Hahn, the Los Angeles County supervisor, if she should cancel it. No, Hahn told her — but do send “a very strong email” warning guests to stay home if they feel sick.

Brooks emailed her guests: To anyone with a cough, fever, runny nose or other flu-like symptoms, “please stay home and rest,” she wrote. “This is especially important considering our age group. We love you and will miss you, and will celebrate together soon.”

The evening of March 8, Brooks rang in her 70th birthday with a 1970’s-themed party at the Trump National Golf Club, a course perched on bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Hahn said she arrived determined not to shake hands, tap toes or bump fists or elbows with anyone. But she recalled a blasé attitude among other revelers: They passed around a single microphone to toast Brooks, and seemed to go out of their way to flout admonishments from public health officials against shaking hands and hugging, Hahn said.

“It was, ‘Oh, this is media pollution, you’re overblowing this,’” she recalled. “I remember going home that night feeling a little bit ashamed.”

A week later, Brooks’ guests got another email. This one began, “Urgent Message.” A party-goer had tested positive for COVID-19. Five people who attended the party have tested positive, including Brooks, according to her daughter. Another 10 people have reported feeling ill but have not been tested, she said.

John Cruikshank and Eric Alegria, Rancho Palos Verdes’ mayor and mayor pro tem, respectively, attended the party. Cruikshank tested positive for COVID-19, according to a city news release. A city spokeswoman said he was resting and unavailable to answer questions about the party or how he had secured a test. Alegria showed no symptoms and was not tested, although he has “chosen to self-quarantine,” the news release said. He declined an interview request, writing in an email he was “tied up in meetings.”

Hahn said she was not tested because she showed no symptoms. On the advice of Gov. Gavin Newsom, she went into self-quarantine on March 16.

Meredith Brooks said she hopes people take her mother’s party as a cautionary tale, one that demonstrates how easily the virus can spread, how quickly the advice of public health and government officials can change, and why people need to follow it.

“It’s not that we didn’t think this was serious,” she said. “We just know much more now than we did then.”

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“You want Ventilators & Masks from the Federal Government’s Reserves to treat your citizens? Well, Governors have to treat me well, it’s a two-way street.”

President Trump,
March 24, 2020

Cape Cod Women for Change

We need a real president right now.
(link to article he shared: https://www.newyorker.com/…/shits-really-going-to-hit-the-f…)

The Growing Chaos Inside New York’s Hospitals

Matthew Morrison is a thirty-six-year-old E.R. doctor at BronxCare, a hospital in the South Bronx, which has a large Dominican population. He speaks “medical Spanish,” he told me. “Fiebre. Dolor. Náusea. Vómito.” On Wednesday, he treated a woman in her mid-sixties with telltale signs of COVID-19: fever, shortness of breath, coughing up blood. She was terrified. She told Morrison, with tears in her eyes, “Doctor, no me siento bien.” Before admitting her, Morrison gave her the same speech he’d been giving all his patients: “You’ve come to the right place. We’re here for you. Unfortunately, we don’t have a specific treatment for COVID, but we’re able to offer all sorts of supportive care.” People were anxious. Another likely COVID-19 patient, an older African-American man, had taken a cocktail of medication—Percocet, Benadryl, an antibiotic—to treat his aches and fever, before arriving, disoriented, at the E.R.

New York City has become an epicenter of the crisis, with more than ninety-six hundred confirmed cases as of Sunday, and hospitals are struggling to keep pace. BronxCare workers were in the process of setting up a separate triage tent, to manage COVID-19 patients. Until then, the E.R.’s waiting room would be crowded with the “worried well,” or, in this case, the worried sick—people with coughs and flulike symptoms that might or might not be signs of COVID-19, who’d come because they wanted to get tested. Most were sent back home, with orders to self-quarantine. Tests were being reserved for people sick enough to be hospitalized.

The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.

“It’s challenging,” Morrison said. “Nobody has any experience with this at all, because there’s been nothing like this since 1918. We can all read the Wikipedia page on the Spanish flu, but that doesn’t show what it was like or describe the experience of people who had actual responsibility.” He was avoiding news stories about health-care workers who’d died of the virus: the doctor in Wuhan, the one in Seattle. But it was hard not to think about them as he donned and doffed his personal protective equipment and pictured all the things that could go wrong, the ways he could inadvertently touch a mask or a glove and become exposed. “The biggest fear is realizing that you’re probably going to get coronavirus no matter what you do.”

Jessica van Voorhees, a forty-three-year-old E.R. doctor at Methodist Hospital, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, found herself watching the disaster with morbid curiosity. “There is something that’s sort of fascinating about watching a pandemic unfold in real time, and seeing the exponential curve,” she said. She was working night shifts on March 8th, 9th, and 10th, when the first patients started trickling in. “At first, it was a big deal. Like, ‘I think we just had a COVID patient!’ Then we had three. And every day it more than doubled.” When I spoke to her on Thursday, the E.R. was getting hundreds of patients with coughs, fevers, and sore throats—most of whom just wanted to be tested for the virus. As in the Bronx, they were being sent home, with orders to self-quarantine. Testing had to be reserved for the very sick. For that reason, van Voorhees had concluded that the official numbers are “totally off. Way off!” She went on, “I think we’re probably testing a small percentage of people who come in here and are clearly positive.”

They were starting to see “bounce-backs”: people who came to the E.R. with a mild illness and returned days later, having swiftly deteriorated. A forty-two-year-old schoolteacher came in, with the usual symptoms: fever, body aches, sore throat, cough. “He was super fit, healthy, and worked out all the time. Never smoked,” van Voorhees said. “We said, ‘Look, we think you have the virus. Go home and self-quarantine.’ ” The man returned three days later, weak and disoriented. “He walked into triage and then fell out of his chair,” van Voorhees said. X-rays revealed a severe viral infection in both lungs. He was hospitalized and put on oxygen. “It’s so weird to see these people who are basically healthy struck down by it,” van Voorhees said.

And it was troubling to see sick patients getting worse. “Normally, when a patient has pneumonia, you hospitalize them and give them antibiotics. As the antibiotics start to work, they get better. But, with COVID-19, there’s no direct therapy, just supportive care, so they get worse.” Patients were often admitted to the hospital needing oxygen. “I check on them the next day, and they’re a lot worse. The day after that, they’ve been intubated and moved to the I.C.U.”
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TESTING! TESTING! TESTING!

"I know the diagnostics community in Germany a bit," Drosten said. "My feeling is that actually the supply of tests is still good. And of course, our epidemic is now also very much up-ramping and we will lose track here, too."

Drosten said the growing number of cases in Germany will soon exceed testing capacities. But for the time being, he thinks the country has had a robust response to the coronavirus pandemic. He's most worried about countries in Africa that aren't well set up for this — countries that, once the crisis comes to them, will find it more difficult to flatten the curve.

 

Italy's fatality rate hovers around 10%. France's is at around 5%. Yet Germany's fatality rate from COVID-19 is just 0.5%. As of March 25, there were 175 deaths and 34,055 cases.

npr.org

Why Germany's Coronavirus Death Rate Is Far Lower Than In Other Countries

Italy's fatality rate hovers around

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