Titanic Sister Ship Gigantic
Claim:  The sister ship to the Olympic and Titanic was originally intended to be named the Gigantic.   . Origins:   The   Titanic was originally conceived by the White Star Company as one of a triumvirate of ships intended to vie with Cunard for the trans-Atlantic passenger service business.  White Star couldn't hope to offer ships as fast as Cunard's liners, so they planned to compete by building liners that were both bigger (and hence able to carry more paying passengers and cargo) and more luxurious than Cunard's.  Moreover, since an Atlantic crossing typically took five days in the new class of steamships operated by Cunard and White Star in the first decade of the 20th century, creating a trio of similar ships would allow White Star to offer trans-Atlantic service in both directions on a regular weekly schedule. The planned ships were so large that the shipbuilders, Harland and Wolff, had to allocate space normally used for building three hulls to handle just two of the new behemoths.  Harland and Wolff planned to construct the liners on a staggered schedule so that White Star would have one ready to go into service each spring between 1911 and 1913, and initially everything went according to plan. The keel of the first ship, the Olympic, was laid in December 1908, and the Titanic followed suit three months later.  The Olympic was launched in October 1910, and the Titanic in May 1911.  The  Olympic's maiden voyage took place in June 1911, and the Titanic's in April 1912.  And then ... After the Titanic disaster, the feverish public interest in these massive ocean liners abated, and the third ship of the planned triumvirate, the Britannic, was finally launched (after extensive modifications and with considerably less fanfare than her sisters) in April 1914.  Like her sister ship Titanic, she wasn't around long, though: World War I broke out before the Britannic ever went into passenger service; she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and pressed into service as a hospital ship; and she struck a mine and sank off the coast of Greece in November  1916.   The magnitude of the Titanic disaster and World War I both overshadowed the short life of the Britannic, and she was gone before many people were even aware she had been built.  Over the years a rumor began to circulate that the Britannic's original name had been the Gigantic, but White Star had thought better of it and quietly changed their minds after the Titanic sank.  White Star maintained that this was not true; they had planned to name the ship Britannic all along and had never considered the name Gigantic. From a purely logical point of view, Gigantic seems the more likely choice.  The names Olympic, Titanic, and Gigantic all evoke a sense of size and strength that Britannic simply does not.  And White Star had considered naming a ship Gigantic on at least one other occasion, as demonstrated by this brief article that appeared 17 September 1892 New York Times: London, Sept. 16  The White Star Company has commissioned the great Belfast shipbuilders Harland and Wolff to build an Atlantic steamer that will beat the record in size and speed. She has already been named the  Gigantic, and will be 700 feet long, 65 feet 7-1/2 inches beam and 4,500 horsepower. It is calculated that she will steam 22 knots an hour, with a maximum speed of 27 knots. She will have three screws, two fitted like Majestic's, and the third in the centre. She is to be ready for sea in March, 1894. We have more than logic and supposition to go by here, however.  Contemporary references publications such as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Lloyd's List and Shipping Gazette as well as a promotional flyer from White Star itself all indicate that White Star did indeed originally have the name  Gigantic in mind, but one could hardly blame them for altering their plans.  After the sinking of the Titanic, passengers were suddenly less concerned with size and luxury than they were with getting to their destinations alive, and the dignified name Britannic conveyed a sense of safety and reliability in a way the attention-grabbing Gigantic could not. Last updated:  18 December 2005    Sources:   Eaton, John P. and Charles A. Haas.  Titanic: Destination Disaster.   Wellingborough, England: Patrick Stephens, 1987.  ISBN 0-85059-868-0  (pp. 54-56). Titanic: Destination Disaster    Heyer, Paul.  Titanic Legacy: Disaster As Media Event and Myth.   Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1995.  ISBN 0-275-95352-1  (pp. 20-22).
A video posted to YouTube on 8 October 2014 offered the deathbed revelations of former Lockheed Martin engineer (aka "Area 51 scientist") Boyd Bushman, who spoke with aerospace engineer Mark Q. Patterson shortly before he passed away at age 78 in August 2014: https://youtu.be/bqQArKpA5ZQBushman went out with an extraterrestrial disclosure bang, making claims about having worked on projects involving antigravity, UFOs, aliens, "Area 51," and Roswell, New Mexico. According to his comments in the video, government officials had been in contact with aliens who strongly resemble humans, tend to be "approximately four and a half to five feet tall," "have three back bones" that are "actually cartilage," and are able to communicate telepathically: "They're able to use their own voice by telepathy to talk to you. You walk in the room with one of them, and all of a sudden you find yourself giving the answer to your question in your own voice," he said. In the video Bushman described two types of aliens, some of whom live for 200 (presumed Earth) years and hail from a planet called "Quintumnia" where, improbably, they continue to rustle cattle despite their vastly advanced technological state: "They divide them into two groups. One group are wranglers, and the others are rustlers  the ones who are stealers of cattle. The two groups act differently. The ones that are wranglers are much more friendly, and have a better relationship with us." The sole piece of evidence Bushman presented in support of his tale about alien visitations from Quintumnia were some purported photographs of these extraterrestrial beings:  However, when Bushman's claims began to gain traction on the Internet, a Reddit user located an existing plastic toy alien doll that very closely resembled the image of the "alien" Bushman had proffered in his video: Reddit https://youtu.be/2FPQL9qoZ9IA news outlet in Quebec also pointed out that the "alien" seen in the pictures held up by Bushman during the interview could be purchased at WalMart. WalMart Did Boyd Bushman prankishly decide to have one over on everyone as he departed his earthly life, was he a publicity-seeking charlatan, was he a true believer who actually thought he had experienced the things he described, or was he suffering the effects of senility? Regardless of his reasons for offering them, Bushman's extraordinary claims weren't the least bit convincing in an evidential sense, as Stuart J. Robbins noted for SWIFT: SWIFT A deathbed confession can be a way to solidify one's reputation. The thinking could easily be, "People really believe that people are 100% honest on their deathbed, so I'm going to make sure I go out with a 'bang' and make my claims yet again. People who didn't believe me before might this time because they'll think I'm telling the truth 'cause I'm about to die." However, in addition to explaining why the common reasons to believe deathbed confession testimony are unconvincing, there's a better reason why the testimony is not useful: They're doing it wrong. Let's say I had a bunch of secrets of exotic physics and decided to do a deathbed confession. Here's what I would say: "I've been working on antigravity and warp field physics for the last 50 years, in secret, with the US government." Then, instead of showing photos of a spaceship or a blurry alien, I would add: "And, here are the equations. Here is a diagram for how you build a device. Here is a working model. Here is exactly how you put everything together." In other words, it shouldn't matter who I am, what my experience is, or what pretty (or ugly) picture I show. What I need to show is HOW to do it. Just saying something doesn't make it so. I need to give enough information for someone else to verify it and duplicate it. Otherwise, what's the point? To make a spectacle before I die? That's why I find this whole deathbed confession thing unconvincing and, perhaps more importantly, not useful: We have no more information than we had before. We have no way to verify any of the information claimed. No way to test or duplicate it. At best, we have another person claiming this stuff is real, and while he or she may be proven out with the passage of time, their "confession" contributed absolutely nothing to that advancement. Until then, it's no better than any other pseudoscientific claim. Cloutier, Jean-Francois.  "An Engineer from Lockheed Martin Talks About UFOs Before His Death."
  TVQC.  26 October 2014. Fetcher, Joshua.  "Former Lockheed Martin Engineer from Texas: I Met Aliens at Area 51."
  San Antonio Express-News.  30 October 2014. van Velzer, Ryan.  "UFOs Over Tucson Video Part of Viral Debate."
  The Arizona Republic.  14 December 2007. U.S. Sen. Mark Warner says presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has a lot of ammunition to fire at Donald Trumps business record. To think that Mr. Trump is trying to lay out this proposition that hes a successful business guy. Hes failed miserably, bankrupt four separate businesses, Warner, D-Va.,saidduring a June 21 interview on CNN. We looked at Warners contention that Trump bankrupted four businesses. Clinton has made similar charges against the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, including on July 6 when shespokein front of the shuttered Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J.. Earlier this year, many of Trumps GOP primary opponents also accused him of running businesses into the ground. Kevin Hall, Warners communications director, sent us a series of media reports about Trumps business problems. Some Trump companies indeed have sought protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcylaw, which shields businesses from creditors as as they reorganize with hope of remaining open. Under court supervision, the companies devise a plan to pay back some of its liabilities over time. Thats different from a Chapter 7 filing, which involves liquidating a companys assets and distributing the proceeds to creditors. PolitiFact National has explored several claims about Trumps business record and has tallied a list of bankruptcies for his companies. Lets take a look. 1991 bankruptcy Trumps first bankruptcy came when he sought protection for the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Trump funded most of the casinos $1 billion construction by using junk bonds with high interest rates,accordingto the Philadelphia Inquirer. When it sought Chapter 11 protection a year after its opening, the casino had about $3 billion in debt. As part of the restructuring, Trump cut his ownership stake in the Taj Mahal by half and sold his airline as well as his personal 282-foot yacht, The Washington Post said in an August 2015story. 1992 bankruptcies Two more of Trumps Atlantic City casinos - the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza and Casino - sought Chapter 11 protection amid heavy debt and cash flow problems, United Press Internationalreportedat the time. A fourth bankruptcy also occurred in 1992 when Trump sought protection for The Plaza hotel in midtown Manhattan. The hotel, which Trumpboughtfor $390 million in 1988, had accumulated more than $550 million in debt. Trump gave up a 49 percent ownership stake and remained CEO, although he had little control over the day-to-day operations of the company,accordingto The New York Times. Most recent bankruptcies Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy in 2004 when his casinos - including the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Marina and Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, and a riverboat casino in Indiana - amassed an estimated $1.8 billion in debt, according to The Associated Press. Trump agreed to reduce his share in the company from 47 percent to 27 percent in a restructuring plan, but he still was the companys largest single shareholder and remained in charge of its operations. Several years later, Trump Entertainment Resorts - formerly Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts - was slammed by the Great Recession and missed a $53.1 million interest payment in December 2008, according toABC News. The companydeclaredChapter 11 in February 2009. After negotiating with the board of directors, Trump resigned as the companys chairman and had his corporate stake in the company reduced to 10 percent. The company continued to use Trumps name in licensing. All told, the record shows that three of Trumps Atlantic City casinos as well as The Plaza hotel went bankrupt in the 1990s. His overall casino and resort company went bankrupt twice in the 2000s while operating under different names. So you could argue that five Trump companies have gone into bankruptcy. Beyond the numbers The next question: Is Trump personally to blame for driving these ventures into bankruptcy, as Warners statement says? Trump defends his use of bankruptcy laws, saying theyve allowed him to keep businesses afloat and that hes rarely relied on them during a career of making hundreds of business deals. In a statement released the day Clinton made her Atlantic City trip, Trump pegged the number of bankruptcies at four. It is an effective and commonly used practice in business to use bankruptcy proceedings to restructure a business and ultimately save jobs, Trumpsaidin a July 6 statement. ExpertstoldPolitiFact National last September that Trump has had a high number of bankruptcies. But they didnt entirely blame him for the Chapter 11 filings and noted that most occurred in the gambling industry, which has struggled. A 1991articleby United Press International about the financial woes of the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza and Casino said the Atlantic City gaming industry was depressed and that nine of the citys 12 casinos saw declining revenues in 1990, with those two Trump casinos seeing the biggest revenue losses. The New York Times noted in astoryearlier this month that Trumps share of the overall Atlantic City casino market started to fall in 1997, and that while revenues for non-Trump gaming ventures in the city rose over the following five years, revenue at Trump casinos declined. Trump told the newspaper that his casinos ran into trouble because they began competing against each other - a statement that The Times said was a tacit acknowledgement that he overbuilt. Roger Gros, publisher of Global Gaming Business magazine,toldthe Los Angeles Times last year that Trump put his Atlantic City casinos in so much debt that subsequent managers couldn't manage them properly. But Michael Viscount, an Atlantic City lawyer who represented unsecured creditors during the 2004 Chapter 11 filing of the Trump Hotels and Casino resorts, doesnt blame Trump for the bankruptcies. HetoldForbes magazine in 2011 that he didnt blame Trump for his Atlantic City casino bankruptcies. Viscount said creditors knew what they were getting into when they lent Trump money. Theyve all played this game before, in the insolvency space. The company that possessed his name filed bankruptcy because it was overleveraged, Viscount told Forbes. What does that tell you? People want to lend him money. He does grandiose things with it. Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, said in an August 2015poston a blog dedicated to bankruptcy and credit issues that a Chapter 11 filing alone doesnt demonstrate a lack of business acumen. Sometimes businesses go bankrupt because of poor management, but sometimes its because of factors beyond their control, Levitin wrote. And indeed, how much, if at all, was Trump involved in the management of the companies? Levitin wrote. I wouldn't be shocked if he was basically licensing his name. Levitin told PolitiFact National last September that its not fair to put all the blame on Trump for his companys bankruptcies because hes acted as any investor would. Investors often own many non-integrated companies, which they fund by taking on debt, and some of them inevitably file for bankruptcy,Levitinsaid. The only difference is that Trump puts his name on his companies, which means people associate them with him, but he's not at all the leader in the bankruptcy space, Levitin said. These bankruptcies were not defining moments for Trump and shouldn't color our view of him. Our ruling Warner said Trump has bankrupt four separate businesses. The number, if anything, is conservative. We count five. But beyond the number, Warners statement also asserts that Trump was the cause of the bankruptcies, and thats harder to parse out. Theres no doubt he had a role in many of the failings, having larded his casino operations with huge debts. But analysts note that Trump wasnt acting alone; he had willing investors who put up big sums of money in the risky gaming industry. Theres also questions about how involved he was in running all of the casinos that bore his name. So on the whole, we rate Warners statement Mostly True. Claim:  Letter to the Wall Steet Journal responds to a "Where's the Outrage?" editorial. CORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED Example:  [Collected via e-mail, April 2009] This letter was sent to the Wall Street Journal on August 8, 2008 by Alisa Wilson, Ph.D. Of Beverly Hills, CA, in response to the Wall Street Journal article titled "Where's The Outrage?" that appeared July 31, 2008. Really. I can tell you where the outrage is. The outrage is here, in this middle-aged, well-educated, upper-middle class woman. The outrage is here, but I have no representation, no voice. The outrage is here, but no one is listening for who am I? I am not a billionaire like George Soros that can fund an entire political movement. I am not a celebrity like Barbra Streisand that can garner the attention of the press to promote political candidates. I am not a film maker like Michael Moore or Al Gore that can deliver misleading movies to the public. The outrage is here, but unlike those with money or power, I don't know how to reach those who feel similarly in order to effect change. Why am I outraged? I am outraged that my country, the United States of America, is in a state of moral and ethical decline. There is no right or wrong anymore, just what's fair. Is it fair that millions of Americans who overreached and borrowed more than they could afford are now being bailed out by the government and lending institutions to stave off foreclosure? Why shouldn't these people be made to pay the consequences for their poor judgment? When my husband and I purchased our home, we were careful to purchase only what we could afford. Believe me, there are much larger, much nicer homes that I would have loved to have purchased. But, taking responsibility for my behavior and my life, I went with the house that we could afford, not the house that we could  not afford. The notion of personal responsibility has all but died in our country. I am outraged, that the country that welcomed my mother as an immigrant from Hitler's Nazi Germany and required that she and her family learn English now allows itself to be overrun with illegal immigrants and worse, caters to those illegal immigrants. I am outraged that my hard-earned taxes help support those here illegally. That the Los Angeles Public School District is in such disarray that I felt it incumbent to send my child to private school, that every time I go to the ATM, I see "do you want to continue in English or Spanish?", that every time I call the bank, the phone company, or similar business, I hear "press 1 for English or press 2 for Spanish". WHY? This is America, our common language is English and attempts to promote a bi- or multi-lingual society are sure to fail and to marginalize those who cannot communicate in English. I am outraged at our country's weakness in the face of new threats on American traditions from Muslims. Just this week, Tyson's Food negotiated with its union to permit Muslims to have Eid-al-Fitr as a holiday instead of Labor Day. What am I missing? Yes, there is a large Somali Muslim population working at the Tyson's plant in Tennessee. Tennessee, last I checked, is still part of the United States. If Muslims want to live and work here they should be required to live and work by our American Laws and not impose their will on our long history. In the same week, Random House announced that they had indefinitely delayed the publication of The Jewel of Medina, by Sherry Jones, a book about the life of Mohammed's wife, Aisha due to fear of retribution and violence by Muslims. When did we become a nation ruled by fear of what other immigrant groups want? It makes me so sad to see large corporations cave rather than stand proudly on the principles that built this country. I am outraged because appeasement has never worked as a political policy, yet appeasing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is exactly what we are trying to do. An excellent article, also published recently in the Wall Street Journal, went through over 20 years of history and why talking with Iran has been and will continue to be ineffective. Yet talk, with a madman no less, we continue to do. Have we so lost our moral compass and its ability to detect evil that we will not go in and destroy Iran 's nuclear program? Would we rather wait for another Holocaust for the Jews  one which they would be unlikely to survive? When does it end? As if the battle for good and evil isn't enough, now come the Environmentalists who are so afraid of global warming that they want to put a Bag tax on grocery bags in California; to eliminate Mylar balloons; to establish something as insidious as the recycle police in San Francisco. I do my share for the environment: I recycle, I use water wisely, I installed an energy efficient air conditioning unit. But when and where does the lunacy stop? Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map, the California economy is being overrun by illegal immigrants, and the United States of America no longer knows right from wrong, good from evil.. So what does California do? Tax grocery bags. So, America , although I can tell you where the outrage is, this one middle-aged, well-educated, upper middle class woman is powerless to do anything about it. I don't even feel like my vote counts because I am so outnumbered by those who disagree with me. Alisa Wilson, Ph.D.Beverly Hills, California Origins:  On 31 July 2008, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs, entitled "Where's the Outrage? Really."  The gist of Mr. Brooks' commentary was to note that"virtually every group in the [U.S.] population [was] less angry" in 2008 than in 1996 with the exception of those who identify themselves as "very liberal," and to question why "folks outside their ranks (including moderate liberals) are failing so miserably to muster up much rage in the current environment." editorial In response to Mr. Brooks' opinion piece, Beverly Hills, California, resident Dr. Alisa Wilson penned the above-quoted letter, which was submitted to (but not published by) the Wall Street Journal.  As Dr. Wilson told us: a) I did indeed write that letter in August 2008.  Please note, however, that although I submitted the letter to the Wall Street Journal, the Wall Street Journal did not publish my letter.   b) The thoughts and sentiments in that article are my own, but apparently have resonated with many people.   c) I have seen some people in the "blog-o-sphere" question whether I am a real person.  Yes, indeed, I exist. Last updated:  19 May 2009 In May 2019, Delta Air Lines came under scrutiny after a photograph emerged on social media that appeared to show a poster encouraging Delta employees to spend their money on video game consoles rather than union dues. Eoin Higgins, an editor and writer at the left-leaning web site Common Dreams, tweeted the photograph on 9 May. The poster contained the following text: "Union dues cost around $700 a year. A new video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union." The poster featured the Delta logo and the URL of the website Don'tRiskItDon'tSignIt.com: lol fuck off @Delta pic.twitter.com/fMNOeW9uFG @Delta pic.twitter.com/fMNOeW9uFG  Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 9, 2019 May 9, 2019   The union in question, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), posted photographs of similar fliers encouraging Delta employees to spend their money on watching baseball and football instead of becoming union members: Oh wow. Theres another one. And its just as bad. Really, @Delta? #GameOverDelta pic.twitter.com/JsSMg1aBRb @Delta #GameOverDelta pic.twitter.com/JsSMg1aBRb  Machinists Union (@MachinistsUnion) May 9, 2019 May 9, 2019  Safe to say @Delta didnt hit a home run with this one either. Three strikes and youre out. Let em have it, Twitter. #GameOverDelta pic.twitter.com/veEk8rvtXY @Delta #GameOverDelta pic.twitter.com/veEk8rvtXY  Machinists Union (@MachinistsUnion) May 10, 2019 May 10, 2019  These photographs prompted multiple inquiries from Snopes readers about whether the fliers were authentic and whether Delta was itself responsible for producing them. A spokesperson for Delta confirmed to Snopes that the airline had indeed created all of the flyers mentioned above, including the "video game" one, and that Delta was also behind the website Don'tRiskItDon'tSignIt.com, which discourages employees  at times in provocative terms  from becoming IAM members: Don'tRiskItDon'tSignIt.com   In a statement, the Delta spokesperson wrote: "The direct relationship we have with our employees is at the very core of our strong culture and it has enabled continuous investments in Delta people. Our employees have the best total compensation in the industry, including the most lucrative profit sharing program in the world. They want and deserve the facts and we respect our employees right to decide if a union is right for them. Delta has shared many communications, which on the whole make clear that deciding whether or not to unionize should not be taken lightly." In a press release on 9 May, the IAM criticized what it called Delta's "union-busting propaganda," writing: press release "Delta Air Lines all-out assault on their employees legally-protected right to unionize with the Machinists Union is confirmation that our campaign to bring the benefits of IAM-representation to more than 40,000 Delta ground workers and flight attendants is succeeding ... Delta has resorted to defaming and spewing lies and misrepresentations about the IAM. They also continually display anti-IAM propaganda in the workplace. These are all hallmark signs of how well the IAM campaigns are doing and how scared Delta is of their employees having a voice in their careers." International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.  "Press Release -- IAM Campaigns Strike a Nerve With Delta Bosses."
  9 May 2019. As if Americans hadn't accumulated enough dark suspicions about their government over the past 50-odd years, along comes an Internet factoid holding that the United States government intentionally (and fatally) poisoned more than 10,000 of its own citizens between 1926 and 1933:   The alarming claim is that the U.S. government added poison to alcohol to discourage people from drinking it during Prohibition, the period from 1920 to 1933 in which it was illegal to produce, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages anywhere in the United States. That didn't mean people stopped making, buying, and drinking booze  they just did it illegally. As noted in virtually every U.S. history textbook ever written, one of the many negative unintended consequences of Prohibition was a booming black market in alcohol that law enforcement was never able to subdue. Prohibition To the question at hand: Did the federal government really add poison to alcohol to discourage people from drinking it? It did, in fact. The government did purposely add poisonous substances to alcohol, and this did result in thousands of deaths during Prohibition. The story of how that came to pass is longer and more nuanced than the Internet meme suggests, however. And it began well before the passage of the 18th Amendment, which made Prohibition the law of the land. According to Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York (Penguin Press, 2010), the practice was called "denaturing". It consisted of adding noxious chemicals to alcohol sold for industrial purposes to make it unfit for human consumption. The process, long used in Europe, was introduced in the United States in 1906 as a means of exempting producers of alcohol used in paints, solvents, and the like from having to pay the taxes levied on potable spirits. 2010 Mainly, this was done by adding some methyl alcohol ("wood alcohol") to grain alcohol, rendering it poisonous. Some formulas also contained substances that made the product taste too awful to drink. One of the ways crime syndicates tried to flout Prohibition, Blum explained in a 2010 Slate article, was stealing industrial alcohol and finding ways to make it potable. The government, in turn, resorted to making it more poisonous: article To sell the stolen industrial alcohol, the liquor syndicates employed chemists to "renature" the products, returning them to a drinkable state. The bootleggers paid their chemists a lot more than the government did, and they excelled at their job. Stolen and redistilled alcohol became the primary source of liquor in the country. So federal officials ordered manufacturers to make their products far more deadly. By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisonskerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be addedup to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly. TIME magazine's 2008 Prohibition retrospective described the horrendous consequences of an unregulated  and, in many instances, purposely adulterated  black-market liquor supply: retrospective It wasn't just the violent Prohibition-era gang wars that were dangerous to Americans drinking homemade moonshine and bathtub gin. According to the Dec. 26, 1922 edition of the New York Times, five people were killed in the city on Christmas Day from drinking "poisoned rum." That was only the beginning. By 1926, according to Prohibition, by Edward Behr, 750 New Yorkers perished from such poisoning and hundreds of thousands more suffered irreversible injuries including blindness and paralysis. On New Year's Day 1927, 41 people died at New York's Bellevue Hospital from alcohol-related poisonings. Oftentimes, they were drinking industrial methanol, otherwise known as wood alcohol, which was a legal but extremely dangerous poison. One government report said that of 480,000 gallons of liquor confiscated in New York in 1927, nearly all contained poisons. Although it is inaccurate in the sense that none of this deadly business began in 1926, the factoid we set out to investigate wasn't entirely wrong in citing that year as a pivotal one. Blum points out that the spate of alcohol-related poisonings that culminated in so many fatalities on New Year's Day 1927 actually commenced a week earlier, on Christmas: It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat. Before hospital staff realized how sick he wasthe alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptomthe man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season. As for the claim that some 10,000 people died of alcohol poisoning during the course of Prohibition through its repeal in 1933, that, too, is a figure we can source to Blum (who did not, in the Slate article, specify where this estimate came from): Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. In sum, federal attempts to reduce the palatability of industrial alcohol came well before Prohibition, and efforts to intensify the risks of consuming it were both well-known and controversial at the time. Such evidence as we've seen does not support the the implication that the government set out to purposely kill drinkers of alcohol, although Prohibition-era lawmakers and public health experts decried what they described as a callous disregard for those who died as result of drinking denatured alcohol. before known Andrews, Evan.  "10 Things You Should Know About Prohibition."
  History.  16 January 2015. Blum, Deborah.  "The Chemist's War."
  Slate.  19 February 2010. Damrau, Frederic, M.D.  "The Truth About Poison Liquor."
  Popular Science Monthly.  April 1927. Norris, Charles, M.D.  "Our Essay In Extermination."
  The North American Review.  December 1928. Rothman, Lily.  "The History of Poisoned Alcohol Includes an Unlikely Culprit: The U.S. Government."
  TIME.  14 January 2015. TIME.  "Top 10 Prohibition Tales: Mortal Moonshine."
  2008. Chicago Tribune.  "Alcohol Gets Double Poison Ration Jan. 1."
  30 December 1926. Wikipedia.  "Prohibition In The United States."
  Accessed 11 May 2017. Wikipedia.  "Prohibition In The United States."
  Accessed 11 May 2017. After Democratic gubernatorial candidates J.B. Pritzker and Chris Kennedy released only summaries of their income tax returns on Nov. 27, rival Daniel Biss wasted no time blasting them for what they didnt make public. As Gov. Bruce Rauner has done since first becoming a candidate in 2013, Pritzker and Kennedy released their federal and state 1040 forms, which reveal only basic details of their their tax pictures. The meat of returns, especially for wealthy taxpayers like Pritzker, Kennedy and Rauner, lies in an array of schedules and attachments to those 1040s that illustrate how they made their money, managed their wealth, donated to charity and reduced their tax burdens by leveraging breaks often used by the wealthy. And neither Pritzker, Kennedy nor Rauner have been willing to share such telling information with voters. These guys are now pretty much living up to the @BruceRauner standard. And falling dismally short of the @MittRomney standard. Even Romney released his full tax returns, Biss said in one of many tweets he issued on the topic that day. These guys are now pretty much living up to the@BruceRaunerstandard. And falling dismally short of the@MittRomneystandard. Even Romney released his full tax returns. -DB In April, Biss, a Democratic state senator from Evanston, releasedfive years worthof full tax returns, including Form 1040 cover sheets and attachments detailing deductions, supplemental income and credits. They showed Biss and his wife, Karin Steinbrueck, with quite modest income, averaging just under $55,000 per year over the five years covered in the returns. Biss spent more than seven months criticizing his wealthy competitors for foot-dragging before they released their returns. With nominating petitions now filed for the March 20 Democratic primary and election season in full swing, the Rauner and Romney comparisons likely will become a hammer with which Biss will repeatedly bash his far wealthier opponents. We decided to look into Biss Twitter claim both to check its accuracy and to examine the history of candidate tax disclosure. The Bruce Rauner standard that Biss, currently a state senator, cites refers to the tax disclosures Rauner has made annually since he first became a candidate for governor in 2013. Though Illinois law does not require candidates or officeholders to make public any income tax information, Raunerreleased three years worthof federal and state 1040 forms when he filed his nominating petitions in November 2013. They showed Rauner and his wife Diana had income of $27.2 million in 2010, $28.2 million in 2011 and $53.4 million in 2012. Their effective tax rates in those years were 16.9 percent, 21.5 percent and 19 percent, respectively. Rauner has continued to release the 1040 forms since then. His 2013 returns, released a month before the 2014 election, showed income of $60.15 million and a 24-percent tax rate. In 2014, the Rauners reported income of$57.5 millionand a 26-percent tax rate. Rauners income ballooned during his first two years as governor. In 2015, hereported incomeof $188 million followed by$91 millionin 2016, with tax rates of 26 and 25, respectively. But because Rauner has not released the schedules and attachments that detail how his income was derived, the 1040 forms lend little insight where his money comes from and how he manages it. Pritzker essentially matched Rauners skimpy disclosure when the Democrat filed his nominating petitions on Nov. 27, but Kennedy did even less. Pritzker releasedsummaries of his last three years of taxesshowing adjusted gross income of $14,950,446 in 2016, $9,974,627 in 2015 and $3,137,655 in 2014. His effective tax rates were 27.7 percent (2016), 24.3 percent (2015) and 37.3 percent (2014). Kennedy confined his release of 1040 information to 2016 returns only. For that year, he reported adjusted gross income $1,242,805 and an effective tax rate of 14 percent. The financial picture for Kennedy and Pritzker, at least, is further obscured by their decisions to not release detail about trusts they also benefit from but which are kept separate from the information reported on their personal tax returns. Like Rauner, Pritzker and Kennedy derived their income from interest, dividends and capital gains, not from wages. Candidates in Illinois are are also required to filestatements of economic interestthat detail entities in which they have ownership interests or derive income, and all the Democrats as well as Rauner have complied. But the information value from such reports is quite limited, with disclosures confined to the names of business interests and not the value of individual investments or income they produce. (Click here for current statements of economic interest fromRauner,PritzkerandKennedy.) Biss also accuses his Democratic counterparts of falling dismally short of the example set by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, like Rauner a longtime private equity investor whose wealth had become an issue in his unsuccessful attempt to unseat then-President Barack Obama. Romney released complete income taxes for2010and2011, including hundreds of pages of schedules and explanatory material that allowed a public view into the management of his fortune. They showedRomney paid a relatively low tax rate of 14.7 percent on a total of $42.6 million in income for the two years combined, and that he held considerable assets in offshore tax havens including Luxembourg, Ireland and the Cayman Islands. In an election in which income inequality had become a major issue, this gave Obamas campaign ammunition to portray the former Massachusetts governor as out of touch with the vast majority of Americans. Romney was following what had become standard procedure for presidents and major presidential candidates of both parties following the scandal plagued administration of Richard Nixon, said Joseph Thorndike, director of theTax History Project, which tracks presidential tax releases. Obama also routinely released full returns annually both as a presidential contender and president. Obamas successor, Donald Trump, is the first U.S. president since Nixon, who resigned from office in 1974, to not release any information about personal taxes. A proliferation of wealthy political candidates coming off successful business careers in Illinois and elsewhere likely portends an era of increasing opaqueness when it comes to tax disclosure, Thorndike speculated. I don't know that 1040s are really all that useful without the rest of the supporting materials, Thorndike said. I suppose that they're better than nothing, except that I think you encourage further disclosures of just the 1040s. Governors roles in administering state taxes should heighten public pressure to release full returns, Thorndike said. These candidates if they win election are going to be in charge of collecting taxes from everyone else and it seems reasonable to me that voters want to know how they conducted themselves and whether they've been living up to their civic duty in the way that everyone else is supposed to, he said. Lawrence Noble, senior director the D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, said the current push in Washington for a sweeping federal overhaul, only underscores the shortcomings of the sort of limited tax disclosure practiced by Rauner, Pritzker and Kennedy. All derive the bulk of their income from investments, and are likely to reap significant financial benefit from the current GOP push in Washington to overhaul the federal tax system that most analysts have concluded is tilted toward tax breaks for the wealthy. How much any of the well-to-do Illinois candidates stand to benefit is impossible to gauge without more information than is disclosed in 1040 forms. Where they have their investments, how much they have and how various pieces of legislation will affect them is important, said Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission. And one of the ways you can tell that is by their taxes and often it's the only way you can tell unless youre just going to take their word for it. Biss sarcastically said his fellow Democratic gubernatorial candidates are living up to the standard for releasing tax information set by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner. He also said they fell short of the example set by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Like Rauner, J.B. Pritzker and Chris Kennedy released only their federal and state 1040 forms, which provide only the most basic information on income and taxes paid. And Romney did release two years worth of full returns, including hundreds of pages of detail, when he was running for president in 2012. There is no law in Illinois requiring gubernatorial candidates or governors to release any tax information whatsoever, and Biss is clearly engaging in some campaign hyperbole when he refers to a Rauner standard and a Romney standard. That said, we find the essence of his statements to be True. In December 2021, a meme circulated on social media that claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the U.S. COVID-19 response and has become a bogeyman for pandemic conspiracy theorists, was the real-life model for the villain in the 2013 movie "Dallas Buyers Club." bogeyman   The meme contains images from the movie's promotion materials, including stars Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, and Jared Leto, next to a black-and-white photograph of a young Fauci. It also contains text that reads: "Remember the movie 'Dallas Buyers Club' about a group of AIDS patients fighting for the right to use cheap, effective drugs against government bureaucrats in the pocket of Big Pharm? The bad guy was Dr. Anthony Fauci." First of all, we note that movies are not real life. Even if it were true that the villain in the movie was based on Fauci, that doesn't mean the story is completely factual rather than dramatized for the purpose of making a good movie. Producer Rachel Winter said as much in a comment published by Slate in 2013: Slate [Screenwriters] Craig [Borten] and Melisa [Wallack] found the right blend of accuracy, not only for the medical details, but for the legal and government issues that Ron faced. There was only so far we could go into 'procedural' mode; the movie had to be entertaining." And entertaining it was, racking up six Academy Award nominations and winning the Oscar for actor, supporting actor, and best makeup and hairstyling. Various aspects of the movie's script don't align with the claim that the villain in the film was modeled after Fauci, and we couldn't find any public statements made by anyone involved with the film indicating that the antagonist was modeled after him. The film is the classic tail of the heroic man who uses his ingenuity and grit to go toe-to-toe with the uncaring and callous Big Government bureaucrats. And though the protagonist in the story is a real person, the antagonists appear to be fictional characters. We don't know whether they are based on real people, or amalgamations of people the protagonist dealt with during his life. McConaughey plays Ron Woodroof, a hard-living Dallas electrician and rodeo rider who gets diagnosed with HIV in 1985. At that time, an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, because there was no treatment for the new epidemic. Woodroof is placed in a clinical trial for azidothymidine (AZT). The thrust of the movie is that there is a conspiracy between the government and medical establishment to push "toxic" AZT on HIV patients, while Woodroof circumvents the system by going to Mexico and getting an unapproved cocktail of drugs and supplements from a doctor who lost his license to practice in the U.S.. Woodroof then returns to form the Dallas Buyers Club with a transgender woman named Rayon (Jared Leto), where they illicitly sell the cocktail, at first for profit and later to save lives, only to be hounded an FDA agent. thrust The antagonist (or "bad guy") in the film is an FDA investigator, which is not an equivalent position to the one Fauci held at the time the events portrayed in the film took place. Fauci was an important public health figure during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but he wasn't an FDA agent. He spent his career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (part of the National Institutes of Health), becoming that agency's director in 1984, one year before the events in the film. important The Washington Post reported in 2014 that neither the portrayal of AZT or Woodroof's legal trouble were accurate in the film, noting, "AZT is actually a very effective therapy against HIV/AIDS." It was known to prolong life after a diagnosis. It's true that the doses it was prescribed at early in the epidemic were often too high, resulting in deleterious effects, but those effects could easily be countered by lowering the dose or stopping the drug. reported The Post noted that AZT became an important part of lifesaving HIV/AIDS treatment for about a decade and as such, saved "millions" of lives. The film included a title card at the end admitting as much. Its portrayal of the FDA's actions vis-a-vis such buyers clubs was also factually problematic, in that in reality, the FDA did cooperate with them. Peter Staley, an HIV/AIDS activist who informally consulted on the film told the Post: The true story was that we made the system bend, and we used the system and needed the system. I wouldn't be alive today without the companies this film paints as evil, and I wouldn't be alive today without civil servants at the FDA who worked incredibly hard in the 1990s to get these drugs out there quickly. Furthermore, Woodroof's issues with the FDA largely stemmed from "his reluctance to stop using harmful treatments." In sum, there isn't any evidence that the antagonist in the movie was based on Fauci, and even if that were the case, that doesn't mean one should draw any real-world conclusions about Fauci based on a movie made for entertainment purposes. Dallas Buyers Club (2013) - IMDb. www.imdb.com, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0790636/plotsummary. Accessed 17 Dec. 2021. Westenfeld, Adrienne. Larry Kramer and Anthony Fauci Sparred During the AIDS Crisis. In the End They Were Friends. Esquire, 27 May 2020, https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a32688094/anthony-fauci-larry-kramer-aids-friendship-legacy/. What Dallas Buyers Club Got Wrong about the AIDS Crisis. Washington Post, 10 Dec. 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/12/10/what-dallas-buyers-club-got-wrong-about-the-aids-crisis/. Harris, Aisha. How Accurate Is Dallas Buyers Club? Slate, Nov. 2013. slate.com, https://slate.com/culture/2013/11/dallas-buyers-club-true-story-fact-and-fiction-in-the-matthew-mcconaughey-movie-about-ron-woodroof.html. Correction [Dec. 17, 2021]: "Dallas Buyers Club" won three Academy Awards, not six as previously reported. The House of Representatives passed a 2.6 percent pay raise for all civilian federal employees in response to a government shutdown that left hundreds of thousands of federal workers either furloughed or working without pay. Some Republican lawmakers decried the move. U.S. Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., sent out atweetsaying, Where I come from you dont get a pay raise just for showing up to work. Today Dem leaders pushed a $5B pay raise for federal workers who are paid well above the HOUSEHOLD income in southern Missouri. Retweet if you think that money would be better spent to #SecureOurBorder. Where I come from you don't get a pay raise just for showing up to work. Today Dem leaders pushed a $5B pay raise for federal workers who are paid well above the HOUSEHOLD income in southern Missouri. Retweet if you think that money would be better spent to#SecureOurBorder On Feb. 1, Smith repeated the claim in hisWeekly Capitol Report. The raise in question matches an increase in pay for military personnel that was passed in 2019. If passed by the Senate, the bill would undo a pay freeze instituted by President Donald Trump on Dec. 28. We decided to take a closer look to see if federal workers really do make that much more than southern Missourians and if so, why. Smiths claim focuses on two different metrics  the income of an individual federal civilian employee and the income of households in southern Missouri. This distinction is important, because household income can include the wages and salaries of multiple people. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis supports Smiths claim that individual federal employees bring in more pay than southern Missouri households. The mean household income in Missouri is $70,144, a figure already lower than the mean income of a federal civilian worker, which is $90,811. When asked for data supporting the claim, Smiths communications director Joey Brown pointed to census data compiled by congressional district. To determine the average household income in southern Missouri, we looked at the two congressional districts that cover the states southernmost counties  districts 7 and 8. Smiths district, Congressional District 8, encompasses the southeast corner of the state, stretching from Ozark County to Jefferson County and extending into the Bootheel region. There, the mean household income is $54,393. In neighboring Congressional District 7, which covers the southwest corner of the state, the mean household income is $62,145. There are many explanations for why federal employees are paid more than the average southern Missourian household. Experts told us that any comparison should also take into account education, training, skills and experience that increase worker productivity and typically result in higher incomes. The federal governments 2.2 million civilian workers tend to be older, more educated and more concentrated in professional occupations than private-sector workers, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress. About 51 percent of federal workers have attained at least a bachelors degree. In Smiths district, about 16 percent of constituents 25 and older have a bachelors degree, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Office of Personnel Management. A report by the Congressional Budget Office that accounted for these differences found that there is a disparity between how federal and private workers are paid. But this disparity depends on levels of education. Theres very little question that the top people in government are being paid quite a bit less usually than the top people with those kinds of skills in the private sector, said University of Missouri economics professor Peter Mueser. Federal workers with a professional or doctorate degree earned roughly 24 percent less than their privately-employed counterparts. But federal workers with no more than a high school education earned 34 percent more than similar workers employed outside the federal government. Federal employees whose highest level of education was a bachelors degree earned 5 percent more. Another factor worth considering is benefits, said Iowa State University economics professor John Winters by email. In addition to salaries and wages, workers are compensated with benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans and job security. However, benefits are more difficult to quantify, because they are in part based on future predictions and less-detailed data is available on benefits than wages. The CBO study found that for federal employees whose highest level of education was a bachelors degree, benefits were 52 percent higher. Average benefits were 93 percent higher for federal employees with no more than a high school education. For employees with a doctorate or professional degree, average benefits were about the same in the two sectors. The bare bones of Smiths claim hold up to scrutiny. Federal workers do take home more in income than the average household in southern Missouri. But Smiths statement doesnt take into account differences between southern Missourians and the average federal employee that help explain income disparity, such as education. We rate this statement Mostly True. fighting Find out Read Submit Become a Founding Member CDC WHO In late December and early January 2021, increasing COVID-19 stimulus payments from $600 to $2,000 per person became a major issue in the Georgia Senate run-off elections. The campaign pitch, made in some form by Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and Joe Biden leading up to that Jan. 5, 2021 election, was that a blue (Democrat-controlled) U.S. Senate would ensure passage of those $2,000 checks. On Jan. 20, Biden unveiled his $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus plan. It proposed issuing $1,400 checks to each person. Some have interpreted the $1,400 as a broken promise, despite the fact that the goal, since December, had always been to achieve a total per person payment of $2,000. The $600 checks already approved by Congress began disbursement starting on Dec. 29, 2020. Here, Snopes takes a granular look at the issue. 1.9 trillion proposed On Dec. 22, 2020, President Donald Trump shocked congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle by threatening to block passage of a third COVID-19 stimulus package that had been negotiated for months and that his administration played a crucial role in shaping. The problem, Trump stated in a video Tweeted out that night, was that the $600 per person cap was not enough. "I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple," he said. shocked video In a confusing moment of limited bipartisanship, Democratic members of Congress agreed with Trump and launched a last-minute campaign to amend the relief bill to include the $2,000 checks requested by Trump. Congressional Republicans, for the most part, opposed the increase. An attempt to raise the amount, pushed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, to the level Trump had requested failed on Dec. 24. Ultimately, Trump signed the originally negotiated bill  which included the $600 per person cap  on Dec. 27.  failed signed In response, on Dec. 28, Democrats in the House passed a stand-alone bill designed to make Trump's vision of $2,000 per person a reality. The text of the bill proposed, in part, to amend the portion of the recently passed relief package "by striking '$600' each place it appears and inserting '$2,000', and by striking '$1,200' each place it appears and inserting '$4,000.' The move was described by The Associated Press at the time as "all but dar[ing] Republicans to break with Trump." text was described That "dare" came at a complicated political moment. The two run-off elections for Georgia would determine the balance of power in the Senate. Both Ossoff and Warnock capitalized on the moment, immediately pushing both their GOP rivals in Georgia to support the House bill upping the payment to $2,000. capitalized On Dec. 28, the same day that the House passed its proposed increase to COVID relief checks, Warnock tweeted that, "Georgians could have gotten $2,000 relief checks. You're only getting $600  because [opponent Kelly Loeffler] refused to fight for more." That same day, Ossoff tweeted that his opponent "David Perdue didnt even want the first round of stimulus checks." On election day, Ossoff's final pitch to voters included the statement, "We will be able to pass $2,000 stimulus checks for the people next week." tweeted tweeted https://streamable.com/tehygd President-elect Biden had made the same general point a day earlier at a rally for Ossoff and Warnock. "By electing Jon and the reverend, you can make an immediate difference in your own lives," Biden said on Jan. 4, "because their election will put an end to the block in Washington of that $2,000 stimulus check. That money that will go out the door immediately." https://streamable.com/jckvga On Jan. 20, Biden revealed his COVID relief plan in an executive order calling for additional payments of $1,400 per person. This led some to interpret Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff's pre-election discussion as a disingenuous bait-and-switch, promising a certain amount of money for votes and then refusing to deliver on that promise. "$2,000 means $2,000," Ocasio-Cortez told The Washington Post following the release of the plan, "$2,000 does not mean $1,400." Other critics accused Biden and Ossoff of "purchasing" peoples' votes and then refusing to "pay up." told Those arguing that Biden et al. broke a political promise by proposing $1,400 checks on top of the already approved $600 ones misrepresent the political debate surrounding COVID-19 relief efforts. Until the "broken promise" talking point emerged, the two political "camps" were the $600 advocates (most congressional Republicans) and the $2,000 advocates (Trump and most congressional Democrats). At no point was there ever a "$2,600 camp." Before the end of December, it appeared logistically possible to modify the amount of money mandated in the previous COVID-relief package through that House bill passed on Dec. 28. According to reporting in The New York Times, however, the Treasury Department "started making direct deposit payments" on Dec. 29, and started mailing checks the next day. reporting Ocasio-Cortez, who suggested Biden's plan did not fulfill the campaign promise of $2,000 checks, explicitly advocated the same solution on Dec. 23, proposing an amendment that would increase payments in the Trump package by $1,400 per person: same solution   Looking back at the statements made by Biden and others, references to "$2,000 checks" must be to these legislative efforts  including those advocated for and voted on by Ocasio-Cortez. Because the Senate cannot "block" legislation that has not yet been proposed, Biden's reference to "the block in Washington of that $2,000 stimulus check" clearly refers to the Senate's unwillingness to take up the House amendment upping the $600 checks to $2,000. reference The end result of the solution Ocasio-Cortez, Biden, Ossoff and Warnock proposed or advocated for in late December would have been a total of $2,000 per person. The end result of the Biden package, if passed, would be a total of $2,000 per person. Indeed, the claim that any politician was arguing for a total of $2,600 per person in late December is completely untenable, and belied by Ocasio-Cortez's support for the $2,000 solutions advocated for by herself and other Democrats at that time. The central issue is this: As the debate about the inadequacy of $600 checks versus $2,000 checks was raging in Congress, the $600 plan had already become law. Money was already being dispersed. To achieve the total of $2,000 advocated for by Trump and Democrats in late December, an additional payment of $1,400 passed through new legislation would be required. Biden's plan, the specifics of which are currently being worked through in the House at the time of this reporting, would achieve that same end result. currently There is a plausible argument, however, that Biden and Ossoff over-promised regarding the rapidity with which a Biden administration and a blue Senate could bring about rapid disbursement of these funds. As the House has yet to approve the legislative package proposed by Biden, the money did not "go out the door immediately," as Biden promised on Jan 4. Nor would that legislative package be passed, as Ossoff claimed it would, "the next week" after his election. The first $600 payments already approved have yet to reach many Americans. many In late December 2020, Democrats united with Trump to push Congressional Republicans to increase COVID-19 stimulus payments from $600 to $2,000 per person. The universal call by those on the Left, at the time, was for a total of $2,000 per person. Ultimately, the $600 plan passed while the viability of $2,000 payments was still gaining traction. References to "$2,000 checks" made in January by Biden and by Georgia's Democratic Senate candidates were to increase existing payments up to $2,000  not to issue a new check for $2,000 in addition to the amount already approved. Because Biden and Ossoff's statements are consistent with the package Democrats ultimately proposed, but because their timeline for getting those payments out the door was too optimistic, we rank the claim that Biden's proposed $1,400 checks are a broken promise as "false." When asked to list his top three priorities for California at a recent forum, Democratic candidate for governorAntonio Villaraigosaresponded: I think weve got to start with the economy, the economy, the economy. The former mayor of Los Angeles acknowledged strong economic growth in some places, but made it clear that not all of California is growing together. Villaraigosa went on to make an eye-opening claim about how many California cities rank among the poorest in the nation. Seventy-seven of the top 300 cities with the highest poverty rate are in our state, Villaraigosa said at theforum, hosted on June 6, 2017 in San Francisco by the Public Policy Institute of California. Villaraigosa makes his claim at about the 6:45 minute mark in this video by the Public Policy Institute of California. We know the state has struggled mightily with poverty. As an example, we ratedTruea claim by Republican Assembly Leader Chad Mayes in January that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation when comparing states and considering cost-of-living. At 20.6 percent, Californias poverty rate in 2015 was well above the national average of 15.1 percent, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report called theSupplemental Poverty Measure. Floridas 19 percent poverty rate ranked second. For a two-adult, two-child family in California, the poverty threshold was an average of $30,000, depending on the region in the state, according to a2014 analysisby Public Policy Institute of California. With this in mind, we decided to fact-check Villaraigosas assertion that California is also home to one-quarter of the nations poorest cities. Governors race Villaraigosa is amongseveral prominent Democratscompeting to succeed Jerry Brown as governor. Others include California TreasurerJohn Chiang; Delaine Eastin, the states former superintendent for public instruction; andGavin Newsom, the states current lieutenant governor. Republican candidates include John Cox, a venture capitalist from San Diego County and Rosie Grier, a former professional football player. PolitiFact California is fact-checking claims in this race. See our Tracking The Truth governors race fact-checkshere. Tracking the Truth: Hear a claim you want fact-checked? Email us at[email protected], tweet us@CAPolitiFactor contact us onFacebook. Our research Villaraigosas spokeswoman said his poverty claim draws on a 2015 report by the National Resource Network calledHidden in Plain Sight: Why California's Economically Challenged Cities Matter. The network was created by the Obama Administration to develop innovative solutions to American cities to help them address their toughest economic challenges. Its study listed 77 economically challenged cities in California, ranging from big metros such as Los Angeles, Sacramento and Oakland to small ones like Lodi, Delano and Watsonville. It defines economically challenged as having at least one of the following characteristics: -- More than 9 percent of residents remained unemployed as of 2013 -- More than 20 percent of adults are living in poverty -- Population decline between 2000 and 2010 reached 5 percent Nationwide, it found nearly 300 such cities. Californias count equals about one-quarter of those. We wondered, however, whether cities listed as economically challenged (due at least partly to a 2013 jobless rate) could also be considered as currently having the highest poverty rate, as Villaraigosa described them this week. Had Villaraigosa stretched the truth or perhaps conflated two separate descriptions of economic hardship? Staff at the National Resource Network, including the studys lead author, did not immediately return requests for comment. Experts weigh in Ann Stevens director of the Center for Poverty Research and a professor of economics at the University of California at Davis, reviewed the study and Villaraigosas claim at our request His statement is not accurate in terms of the poverty rate, Stevens told us. Thats because the study labeled many of these cities as economically challenged because of their 2013 jobless rate, which is different than the poverty rate in 2013 or the poverty rate on average today. We found nearly half of the 77 cities described as economically challenged qualified for that label not because their poverty rate was above 20 percent, but because of their high jobless rate in 2013. In fact, the poverty level for at least some of these cities was closer to or below the national average. At that time, many cities in California were still struggling with high unemployment due to the Great Recession, Stevens added. But thats a temporary measure of economic hardship, not a permanent one. Caroline Danielson, who researches poverty at the Public Policy Institute of California, said many of those cities are no longer struggling with unemployment. Los Angeles, for example, now has a jobless rate of 3.9 percent down from 9.7 percent in 2013, she said. Danielson said theres no comparable ranking of every American city, large and small, by poverty rate. If there was, she said: I dont believe that California would be quite so overrepresented as we found in this report. Thats not to say that California has no high poverty cities. Along with pointing to the study, Villaraigosas spokeswoman said the candidate would still consider the 77 cities in the study to be among those nationally with the highest poverty rate - certainly well above the average - and that is what makes them economically challenged. Thats not the same as Villaraigosas original statement that all 77 rank nationally among cities with the highest poverty rate. Our ruling Candidate for California governor Antonio Villaraigosa recently claimed: Seventy-seven of the top 300 cities with the highest poverty rate are in our state. He relied on a study that grouped  77 economically challenged cities in California among nearly 300 such cities in the nation. But it used data from four years ago, when many cities were still recovering from the Great Recession. Villaraigosa made it sound as if these cities are still experiencing the same level of hardship. Also, experts on poverty said the economically challenged label isnt the same as Villaraigosas description of these cities as among the poorest in the nation. Nearly half the cities on the studys list qualified for that label not because of their poverty level. Many, in fact, had poverty rates below the state average. Instead, they qualified because they had a high unemployment rate in 2013. The jobless rate in many of those cities has improved considerably since then. Villaraigosa touched on a real problem in California: Poverty remains widespread and entrenched. But he mischaracterized the results of a study and painted a darker picture of economic hardship in California than the facts bear out. We rate Villaraigosas claim False. FALSEThe statement is not accurate. Click here formoreon the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check.