Political donations made by the DeVos family.
On 7 February 2017, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education in the new Trump administration by a narrow 51-50 margin, with the tie-breaking vote being cast by Vice President Mike Pence. All of the votes approving DeVos were cast by Republican senators, leading some of her detractors to posit the theory that she had essentially paid for her position via campaign contributions. That theory was illustrated by several charts circulated online that allegedly documented the amount of money DeVos had contributed to various senators:  The above-displayed chart first appeared on Reddit, but the data it incorporates was taken from a report published by the Center for American Progress. That report included another chart showing the DeVos family's campaign contributions: Reddit  A similar report filed by the Center for Responsive Politics stated that "Betsy DeVos and her relatives have given at least $20.2 million to Republican candidates, party committees, PACs and super PACs" since 1989: report In the 2016 cycle alone, the family had given at least $10 million as of late October to a host of GOP candidates and committees. Much of that  $4.4 million  went to super PACs: those supporting the White House bids of Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz as well as former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businesswoman Carly Fiorina, and the Koch brothers-backed Freedom Partners Action Fund and the super PAC started by Republican strategist Karl Rove, American Crossroads; the latter two groups helped support numerous Republicans in tight House and Senate races. However, these charts don't show how much Betsy DeVos personally contributed to Republican campaigns.  A second chart from the Center for Responsive Politics documented that Betsy DeVos herself was only responsible for about 7% of these contributions:  It should also be noted that these charts tally cumulative donations made over the span of two and a half decades (although the 2016 campaign cycle comprised the bulk of those donations). None of this information in itself establishes that the contributions were made with the intent of gaining office for Betsy DeVos, or that they had that effect (intended or not).  Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, received $43,200 from the DeVos family but voted "No" during Betsy DeVos' confirmation hearing. And although nearly all the Republican senators who had received contributions from the DeVos family voted "Yes," so did all the Republican senators who had not received any contributions from the DeVos family. The Washington Post posited a much more likely explanation for the confirmation vote breakdown  partisanship: posited If Democrats controlled the Senate, DeVos would have lost her confirmation. Theres every reason to believe that [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell let [Susan] Collins and Murkowski vote no on DeVos for political reasons, holding enough votes in reserve to assure shed win. The motivation was partisan support for a Republican nominee, not that a small fraction of his past campaign financing depended on DeVoss generosity. The Washington Post also noted that while the DeVos family contributed millions of dollars to Republican candidates, their contributions constituted only a sliver of the total money raised by those campaigns:  It's no secret that DeVos and her family have been major donors to the Republican Party over the last few decades. In 1997, DeVos wrote that her family was the "largest single contributor of soft money" to the Republicans: I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party. Occasionally a wayward reporter will try to make the charge that we are giving this money to get something in return, or that we must be purchasing influence in some way. [...] They are right. We do expect some things in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues. We expect a return on our investment; we expect a good and honest government. Furthermore, we expect the Republican party to use the money to promote these policies, and yes, to win elections. During DeVos' confirmation hearing in January 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders asked her about how much her family had contributed to the Republican Party over the years, and she averred that an estimate of about $200 million might be accurate: confirmation hearing Sanders: Mrs. DeVos, there is a growing fear, I think, in this country that we are moving toward what some would call an oligarchic form of society, where a small number of very, very wealthy billionaires control, to a significant degree, our economic and political life. Would you be so kind as to tell us how much your family has contributed to the Republican Party over the years? DeVos: Senator, first of all thank you for that question. I again was pleased to meet you in your office last week. I wish I could give you that number. I dont know. Sanders: I have heard the number was $200 million. Does that sound in the ballpark? DeVos: Collectively? Between my entire family? Sanders: Yeah, over the years. DeVos: Thats possible Sanders: Okay. My question is, and I dont mean to be rude. Do you think, if you were not a multi-billionaire, if your family has not made hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions to the Republican Party, that you would be sitting here today? DeVos: Senator, as a matter of fact, I do think that there would be that possibility. Ive worked very hard on behalf of parents and children for the last almost 30 years to be a voice for students and to empower parents to make decisions on behalf of their children, primarily low-income children. Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) told Politico that the DeVos family's contributions were made legally and were properly disclosed: Politico All of that is disclosed, Alexander said. You can ask those senators and evaluate it yourself. Thats the reason we have limits on campaign contributions and we have disclosures of those things. A spokesperson for Florida senator Marco Rubio, who was singled out for having received nearly $100,000 from the DeVos family, defended his acceptance of those contributions: singled "People contribute to Senator Rubio's campaign because they support his agenda. Ms. DeVos is a strong supporter of empowering parents and providing educational opportunity for all, policies Senator Rubio has supported for over a decade. Her nomination was opposed by Democrats who take millions of dollars from the big unions obsessed with denying school choice to low-income children.  Brown, Emma.  "With Historic Tiebreaker from Pence, DeVos Confirmed as Education Secretary."
  The Washington Post.  7 February 2017. Alexander, Dan.  "Betsy DeVos Says It's 'Possible' Her Family Has Donated $200M to Republicans."
  Forbes.  17 January 2017. Bump, Phillip.  "The DeVos Vote Is a Bad Case Study for the Power of Campaign Contributions."
  The Washington Post.  7 February 2017. Stratford, Michael.  "DeVos Heads Into Confirmation with a Megadonor's Advantage."
  Politico.  20 December 2016. Noland, Jack.  "Betsy DeVos and Her Big-Giving Relatives: Family Qualifies as GOP Royalty."
  Center for Responsive Politics.  1 December 2016. Boser, Ulrich.  "Conflicts of DeVos."
  Center for American Progress.  12 January 2017.
In June 2021, as airlines experienced a surge in demand, multiple news outlets reported that American Airlines (AA) was cutting about 1% of its flights in the coming weeks amid bad weather and labor shortages. Reuters reported: "American Airlines said the incredibly quick ramp up of customer demand also came at a time when bad weather caused multi-hour delays over the last few weeks, disrupting flight and crew work hours. The company said some of its vendors were also struggling with labor shortages, impacting the airline's operations." news outlets reported Responding to that latter reason for the cuts, one Twitter user authored the below-displayed tweet that makes several claims about the company's budgeting during the COVID-19 pandemic and allegedly explains why AA was struggling to fill job positions. one Twitter user COVID-19 pandemic   We contacted the tweet's author to learn their process for composing the post, as well as their potential connection to the airline. We have not received a response, but we will update this report when, or if, that changes. Nonetheless, the tweet includes the following claims: Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act Doug Parker But, before we proceed, let us note here: The airline's communication team's statements to news media regarding the upcoming flight cancellations through mid-July (see CNN's story here, CNBC's coverage here, and NBC's article here), including to Snopes, said "labor shortages [among] some of our vendors" (emphasis added) were affecting operations. See the statement we received, for example: here here here   That umbrella term, "vendors," could include companies that operate independently but have a contract with American to provide goods or services for its flights, such as aircraft equipment manufacturers or business that sell blankets or pillows for passengers. Snopes asked a company spokesperson what vendors, specifically, faced employment gaps and impacted flights, and he did not answer the question. While the spokesperson shared other comments (which we included in the sections below), he also did not share a response to critics who believed the company should shift around funds, including those provided by the federal government, so that the CEO received less compensation and rank-and-file staff earned higher paychecks. For that reason and others, this fact check does not address that underlying argument of the tweet. Not quite  but the airline company did take advantage of other federal grants and loans. Let us explain that conclusion. Only companies that qualified as a "small businesses" (criteria here), or had 500 or fewer employees, were eligible for PPP loans. American, on the other hand, documented about 133,700 full-time employees, ranging from pilots to flight attendants to mechanics, federal regulatory documents showed. here regulatory documents showed Rather, AA utilized the government's Payroll Support Program (PSP), a different financial boost established by the CARES Act that provided $25 billion for various airlines' payroll expenses. Payroll Support Program The U.S. Department of the Treasury distributed the money, in part, based on air carriers' payroll expenses from April 2019 through September 2019, and said it "must exclusively be used for the continuation of payment of employee wages, salaries, and benefits." U.S. Department of the Treasury According to that federal agency's database of recipients and AA spokesperson Matt Miller, American was budgeting with $12.7 billion from the program, as of this writing. The majority of that amount (almost double what was described in the viral tweet) was one-time grant money, while about one-third represented loans that the airline carrier needed to pay back. agency's database 12.7 "These funds ensured we could keep our team members on payroll throughout the pandemic despite the significant drop-off in demand for air travel," wrote Miller in an email to Snopes. Yes, Parker, who is paid almost entirely in stock awards, took home $10.66 million in total compensation in 2020, according to Miller and The Dallas Morning News. (The carrier's headquarters is located in Dallas-Fort Worth, making the Dallas newspaper a primary source of news about it.) The Dallas Morning News That compensation was based on the company's profits in 2019 (so it did not factor in the financial struggle of the pandemic), and was his smallest paycheck since taking the helm. The newspaper reported: "Parker's compensation has mostly hovered between $11.1 million and $12.3 million a year during his time as CEO, with the exception of 2013 when he made $17.6 million based largely on bonuses he had for merging his former airline, US Airways, with American Airlines." CEO Parker gave up his cash salary in 2015 to move to the all-stock compensation plan, along with benefits including flights and life insurance premiums. Miller told us: "Being paid in stock ensures his compensation is at-risk, based on the results the company achieves, and aligned with our shareholders interests," he said. "Dougs realizable compensation for 2020 was considerably less  approximately $2.9 million, or 23% of the target." This is false. While the company did cut some supervisor and support staff jobs, and it was true that its workforce overall declined by about 31,000 positions in 2020, it was erroneous to attribute that decrease exclusively to involuntary layoffs. According to annual reports to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission obtained by Snopes, AA's payroll indeed shrunk from about 133,700 full-time employees at the end of 2019 to roughly 102,700 such workers. That was a 23% workforce reduction, totaling about 31,000 positions. However, neither those regulatory documents, nor a news story by the Dallas Business Journal about them, said that decrease was because executives enacted widespread layoffs. news story by the Dallas Business Journal It was true American briefly furloughed 19,000 employees in fall 2020 and then brought them back weeks later, after the company secured more PSP funding from the federal government. furloughed 19,000 employees Then, months later, news reports said the company warned 13,000 employees of possible lay offs, pending the country's rate of vaccinations and interest in traveling. As of this writing, however, those worker remained in their jobs, Miller told Snopes. news reports But, as we noted, there were some permanent job losses during the pandemic. The airline cut about 30% of its management and administrative positions, totaling roughly 5,000 jobs, according to news reports and Miller. Those were the only involuntarily layoffs, based on our research. We found no evidence of widespread layoffs for employees who maintain the company's operations or deal with customers, like the tweet implied. Rather, Miller said, the company documented tens of thousands fewer workers in 2020 compared to 2019 because it had expanded its "early out program." A slew of front-line workers agreed to voluntarily terminate their employment to take advantage of severance benefits, or to leave the company for months on end for partial compensation. "Ultimately our headcount is smaller than it was before the pandemic, but the vast majority of that reduction is from voluntary departures," Miller said. "Any front-line employees who departed the company did so voluntarily via an early out program. The only involuntary departures were on the management side." In sum, we rate this multi-pronged claim a "Mixture" of true and false information. Democrats searching for the right combination of punches to drive Scott Walker from office have focused on joblessness, schools, tax fairness and leadership style.One of the jabs they throw repeatedly centers on cuts Walkers 2011-13 budget made in state aid to local school districts.Kathleen Falk, the best-known Democrat so far in the likely 2012 gubernatorial recall election, tried to land a roundhouse right as she becamethe first announced candidate.The former Dane County executive told a Feb. 8, 2012 audience in La Crosse that Walker has divided us instead of united us.He's done it with the wrong choices,Falk said, according to a WXOW-TV online story. He gave big tax breaks for a few and then made the biggest cuts to education in our state's history.The states history covers a long time.Are Walkers cuts truly the largest ever?We have already looked at several statements about Walkers education budget.We gave state Rep. Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, aMostly Falsefor saying Walkers property tax freeze would cost schools $1.6 billion in revenue. It was about half that, according to the most common accounting.We labeledMostly Falsea claim from Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller that Wisconsin enacted the most drastic cuts to K-12 public schools of any state in the nation. At the time, the study he cited looked at only 24 states, not all 50.Now we have Falks claim.It is bold, but it actually is narrowly drawn, referring specifically to cuts in state aid -- a number easy to track and measure.Asked for backup, Falks campaign said she was referring not just to state aid to local schools, but cuts in state funding to the university system and technical colleges. And she meant the biggest cut ever in raw dollars, according to campaign spokesman Scot Ross.To be sure, Walker made two other moves that affected school budgets: A virtual freeze on schools ability to increase property taxes to make up for lost aid, and collective bargaining limits that allowed many districts to cut costs by imposing larger contributions from workers towards health insurance and pensions.But Falks statement was not about net impact, just the state funding side of the equation.Falks campaign did not provide a total of the education cuts, nor provide any history of funding cuts other than to say they had found none bigger.We did the math and found $792 million in aid cuts to school districts, $250 million in reduced aid to the university system and $71.6 million from the tech colleges.Total: $1.11 billion.Looking at it in terms of raw dollars limits the usefulness of any comparison, given inflation. That said, lets look back.Local schoolsWalkers budget was not the first to cut education aid, though any cut is rare.Facing a massive projected shortfall, lawmakers and then-Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, approved cutting $284 million from aid to school districts in the 2009-11 budget.The cut under Doyle was the first ever, according to Todd Berry, president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance, a nonpartisan research group that tracks the history of aid changes.We couldnt confirm that, but went back to the mid 1980s and found no evidence of a cut. If there was one earlier than that, it couldnt rival Walkers -- unless a previous governor cut 100 percent of the school aid budget, which was much smaller then.Walkers $792 million cut was much larger in raw dollars than the $284 million cut in 2009, and as a percentage -- 7.4 percent vs. 2.6 percent.In the first year under Walkers budget, nearly all districts lost aid, and the median decrease was 9.9 percent, according to the state Department of Public Instruction.University systemDoyle and Walker cut identical amounts -- $250 million -- from the base budget of the UW system. The cut under Doyle was in 2003-05.The cut under Doyle was a bigger percentage cut than Walkers because the university systems biennial budget from state taxes grew from about $2 billion to $2.3 billion between 2003 to 2011.On the other hand, Walkers cut was deeper if you factor all the budget adjustments to the state-tax-supported portion of UWs budget, according to Dave Loppnow, an education funding expert at the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.For instance, UW got more state funding for things like rising fuel and utility costs, offsetting some of the $250 million funding cut. By this measure, it was about an 8 percent reduction by Doyle, and 9 percent under Walker.Loppnow said the $250 million base-budget cuts under both governors were the largest ever in raw dollars.Tech schoolsWalker proposed, and the Republican-controlled Legislature passed, a 30 percent cut in general aid to the states technical college system. That amounted to $71.6 million over two years.The tech college system found records dating to 1991 that showed only one other general aid cut  -- a 0.5 percent trim in 2007.As we noted in arecent item, that general aid is only 12 percent of the tech systems funding, which relies heavily on property taxes.So, in the big picture, there have been very few instances of cuts to education, with all of them coming in recent years as deficits mounted.What makes the Walker cuts stand out is the combination -- in the same budget -- of reductions across the three levels of education: kindergarten-12th grade; tech colleges; and the universities.In 2003-05, when the UW took a hit, Doyle and lawmakers boosted the K-12 budget by 1 percent, or $115 million. And the tech colleges general state aid was not reduced.As we noted, there were many other changes in the budget.Notably, Walker sharply curtailed collective bargaining rights for public employees, including university and local school employees.That allowed local school districts to save at least $200 million in pension costs because most districts put in place a pension change made possible by the budget, according toLegislative Fiscal Bureau estimates, school officials and our calculations.The savings to districts from changes to health insurance premiums were significant in some cases, but vary widely by district; no statewide cost savings estimate is available.But some districts, due to existing union contracts and other reasons, were not able to benefit from the health insurance changes. That underlines an element essential aspect of Falks statement: The state controls its aid, but not what is done at the local level.Our conclusionFalk claimed Walkers cuts in state support to local schools, tech colleges and public universities amount to the largest in state history.We found previous cuts in those areas, but not in all three in the same year, and not nearly as deep when you roll them all together as has Falk.We rate her statement True. Texas remains home to a greater share of people in poverty than the nation as a whole,Bee Moorheadwrote in a September 2015,oped articlein theAustin American-Statesman. Not news? Well, Moorhead, executive director of the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy/Texas Impact, also wrote that according to U.S. Census Bureau figures, Texas once again outstripped the national poverty rate in 2014, as we have done since at least 1959. Thats 56 years--a long time to be better at poverty. We wondered. To our inquiry, Moorhead emailed us a spreadsheet,drawing on bureau figures, indicating that in select years, or each decade from 1959 through 2009, more Texans lived below the federal poverty level, by percentage, than Americans as a whole. According to the figures, which we confirmed on the bureau website, the share of Texans in poverty was greatest in 1959  31.7 percent, 9 percentage points greater than the 22.1 percent of Americans nationally in poverty. In the selected years, the smallest gap occurred in 1979 when 14.7 percent of Texans lived in poverty compared with 13.1 percent of Americans overall, according to the figures. Moorhead said she separately drew the 2014 Texas poverty rate (16.4 percent) from a chartfetchablefrom a bureau web page last updated Sept. 16, 2015. Nationally in 2014, the bureauannounced,the poverty rate was 14.8 percent, meaning 46.7 million people lived in poverty. Moorhead also pointed out abureau websiteenabling comparisons of poverty in a state to the nation each decade from 1960 through 2010, leading us to develop this Texas-U.S. comparison: SOURCE:Web page,Poverty Rates by County, 1960-2010,U.S. Census Bureau (accessed Oct. 7, 2015) Measuring poverty Through the bureau, the federal government has estimated residents living in poverty for more than 50 years, initially from a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate of how much income that families under economic stress needed in order to put food on the table. How the government defines poverty has changed a bit over the years, but generally,the bureau says, it uses a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. If a family's total income is less than the family's threshold, then that family and every individual in it is considered in poverty. The thresholds dont vary by location, the bureau says, but are updated for inflation. The poverty definition rolls in income before taxes and does not include capital gains or noncash benefits (such as public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps), the bureau says. Each years national poverty estimates derive from the bureaus Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, which surveys about 100,000 households a year, asking about income from more than 50 sources,according tothe bureau. An experts look Moorhead did not delve into poverty rates for every year from 1959 on, so we asked Daniel Dillon of the University of Texas Child and Family Research Partnership for a look. Drawing from CPS data, heput together a chartsuggesting the Texas poverty rate exceeded the national rate each year from 1959 through 2014. But Dillon and bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein told us that comparative year-by-year figures start only in 1980. Since 1980, Dillon summed up, the Texas poverty rate has generally bounced between 15 percent and 17 percent with a few exceptions. The fact that is it so consistent means that the rate of growth in the general population is basically on par with the rate of growth in the poor population. Sometimes they dont change at the same rate though, like after the recession, where the number of poor shot up but population growth was stable. This caused the poverty rate to increase. So the poverty rate is reflecting the interplay between total population change and poor population change, the latter of which is generally more affected by fluctuations in the economy. Big picture: The 4.4 million Texans in poverty in 2014 was double the 2.2 million residents in poverty in 1980,Dillon noted. In the period, the states total population increased 87 percent, escalating from 14.3 million to 26.7 million, he noted. Dillon pointed out there were times the gap between poverty in Texas and the nation narrowed, including 2014. Broadly, he wrote, the gap grew through the 1980s until about 1988, at which point it peaked at a difference of 5 percentage points. Then the gap began to narrow, he wrote, expanding and contracting every few years until 2010 when it began to close. In 2014, Texas had a poverty rate 1.6 percentage points above the national rate, Dillon said. Thats the closest we have been to the national rate since 1984, when the gap was 1.3 percentage points. Several factors, Dillon said, explain why Texas has consistently had a bigger chunk of residents in poverty than the nation on average. The state is home to a larger foreign-born population than most states and is one of a few minority-majority states in that non-Hispanic whites make up a minority of the residents, he wrote. In comparison to their numbers, minority groups in Texas tend to be overrepresented among the poor. Education level is also strongly linked to poverty status, and Texas is the near the bottom when it comes to the percentage of the adult population with a high school degree, Dillon said. Finally, Texas has a higher percentage of children than most states and child poverty has been on the rise. Today, a quarter of Texas children live below the poverty line. Dillon said the narrowing gap between the Texas and national poverty rates might be explained by the state generally growing faster than most states due both to new births and migration from other places. As long as the mix of people moving to Texas are more likely to be above the poverty line than below it, this will drive the poverty rate down. Similarly, if births to non-poor families outpace those to poor families, this will also drive the rate down, Dillon wrote. Another indicator We also askedLori Taylor, a Texas A&M University economist, to evaluate Moorheads claim. By phone, Taylor said that while its likely the Texas poverty rate has consistently outpaced the national rate, on average, its worth mention that the rate has always been calculated by assuming the same income levels put residents in poverty regardless of location. She said this has tended to lead to overstatements of people in poverty in lower cost-of-living parts of the country and understatements of residents in poverty in high-cost areas. Taylor and a colleague pointed out in aDecember 2014 articlethat in 2013, per the government's poverty threshold, a family of four with two children and a household income of $23,624 was classified as poor regardless of whether the family lived in rural Arkansas, where a typical two-bedroom apartment rents for less than $600, or in New York, where a two-bedroom apartment rents for more than $1,400. In the past few years, the census bureau has been developing its Supplemental Poverty Measure, which reaches its rates by taking into account regional differences in housing costs. And, Taylor noted, the bureaufound in its 2013 surveysthat Texas and the U.S. had the same 15.9 percent SPM rate. In contrast, the general 2013 poverty rate for the country was 14.8 percent and the Texas rate was 16.9 percent. By phone, Moorhead agreed that using a standard measure of poverty across the country is insufficient to characterize the complexity of regional economies. But the SPM is a new measure too, she said, and rates havent been calculated retroactively to cover nearly all the years included in her Texas-U.S. comparison. Our ruling Moorhead said Texas has outstripped the national poverty rate since at least 1959. Available poverty rates for select years through 1979 and for 1980 through 2014 back up this statement. Yet poverty rates dont appear to be available for many earlier years. Also, a new supplemental poverty measure makes a case for the same share of Texans and Americans lately living in poverty provided regional differences in housing costs are factored in. We rate this claim Mostly True. MOSTLY TRUE The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. Click here formoreon the six PolitiFact ratings and how we select facts to check. The Lone Star state is home to its very own state-regulated power grid known as the Texas Interconnection. The question of whether Texas produces its own power is one that the Snopes team has seen time and again. We often see this trend during times of power crisis, as was the case in 2021, when the states power grid failed, or when energy politics and prices are making the headlines. This was the case in June 2022 when U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican representing Texas, tweeted that the impact of President Biden being beholden to the Green New Deal radicals in his party has electricity costs through the roof in Texas. failed June 2022 Green New Deal  Yes, it is true that Texas has its own power grid. The Texas Interconnection (TIS) is one of five alternating current (AC) power grids known in north America as interconnections, according to the U.S. Office of Electricity. TIS spans most of the state and covers all of the electric utilities maintained under the system, each of which is electrically tied together and operates at a synchronized frequency of a 60-hertz average during normal system conditions. U.S. Office of Electricity  Public Domain Texas ownership over its power grid is not necessarily for technical reasons, but more for political ones, reported the Texas Tribune in 2011: namely, to avoid the feds. Power grids that cross state lines are managed by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is responsible for the national energy program, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the sale and transmission of electricity in interstate commerce. reported But because TIS does not cross state lines, the system can avoid regulation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and is instead managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). Some 26 million Texans and 90% of the electrical load rely on over 52,700 miles of transmission lines contained within the TIS. As a nonprofit, ERCOT is subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature. ERCOT 90% 52,700 miles Public Utility Commission of Texas Its no secret that Texas is rich in energy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports that Texas produces more electricity than any other state, and nearly twice as much as Florida, which comes in at second place. Energy rates are typically determined by a combination of fuel costs, power plant availability, variations in demand, and availability of generation sources, notes the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This cost varies from minute to minute, and in hot climates like Texas, prices are highest in the summer when total demand for air conditioning increases. reports U.S. Energy Information Administration In the Lone Star State, those prices are set by ERCOT. To understand the history of ERCOT, we should also take a quick look back at the U.S. power grid through the 20th century. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Federal Power Act, which gave the Federal Power Commission the power to oversee interstate electricity sales. But Texas wanted to remain out of federal oversight, particularly as its grid did not cross state lines. signed The establishment of TIS can trace its history back to World War II, when 10 independent power grids across the state connected to send excess power to the coast for manufacturing, according to ERCOT. Similarly, utility companies across the nation began to tie themselves together to be more productive, organized, and responsive both in the event of an emergency and to more efficiently manufacture and export goods to troops overseas. ERCOT tie themselves together Following a blackout on Nov. 9, 1965, when 30 million people in the Northeastern U.S. lost power, legislators created the National Electric Reliability Council, now known as the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC). Five years later, ERCOT was founded to manage the Texas grid in accordance with national standards but still out of the way of federal fingers. (For more ERCOT history, see this explainer published by NBC Austin affiliate KXAN.) founded this explainer We should also note that the Texas power supply is neither totally independent nor does it cover the entire state. El Paso is on its own grid, as are parts of northeastern and southeastern Texas. In 2011 following rolling blackouts, Texas also imported some power from Mexico, as well as two ties to the Eastern U.S. grid.) imported Sources Archive.Ph. https://archive.ph/oiee1. Accessed 7 June 2022. Cohn, Julie. When the Grid Was the Grid: The History of North Americas Brief Coast-to-Coast Interconnected Machine [Scanning Our Past]. Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 107, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 23243. IEEE Xplore, https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2018.2880938. DG - Distributed Generation. https://www.puc.texas.gov/industry/electric/business/dg/dg.aspx. Accessed 7 June 2022. Does Biden Support the Green New Deal? Snopes.Com, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/does-biden-support-green-new-deal/. Accessed 7 June 2022. Electric Reliability Council of Texas. https://www.ercot.com/. Accessed 7 June 2022. ERCOT Organization Backgrounder. https://www.ercot.com/news/mediakit/backgrounder#:~:text=Founded%20in%201970%2C%20ERCOT%20is,grid%20serving%20most%20of%20Texas. Accessed 7 June 2022. EXPLAINER: Why the Power Grid Failed in Texas and Beyond. Snopes.Com, https://www.snopes.com/ap/2021/02/17/why-the-power-grid-failed-in-texas-and-beyond/. Accessed 7 June 2022. Galbraith, Kate. Texplainer: Why Does Texas Have Its Own Power Grid? The Texas Tribune, 8 Feb. 2011, https://www.texastribune.org/2011/02/08/texplainer-why-does-texas-have-its-own-power-grid/. Helman, Christopher. Rolling Blackouts Force Texas To Import Power From Mexico. Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/02/03/rolling-blackouts-force-texas-to-import-power-from-mexico/. Accessed 7 June 2022. Learn More About Interconnections. Energy.Gov, https://www.energy.gov/oe/services/electricity-policy-coordination-and-implementation/transmission-planning/recovery-act-0. Accessed 7 June 2022. OAKTrust Home. https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/. Accessed 7 June 2022. Prices and Factors Affecting Prices - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/prices-and-factors-affecting-prices.php#:~:text=Changes%20in%20prices%20generally%20reflect,to%20meet%20the%20increased%20demand. Accessed 7 June 2022. The History of ERCOT: How Texas Became the Only State with Its Own Power Grid. KXAN Austin, 24 Feb. 2021, https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/the-history-of-ercot-how-texas-became-the-only-state-with-its-own-power-grid/. Claim:  Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards beat a heroin addiction by having his blood replaced at a Swiss medical clinic.   Status:  False. Origins:  As the clich goes, look up 'debauchery' in the dictionary, and you'll find a picture of Keith Richards.  Although many tales about the   depravity of the Rolling Stones were deliberately concocted for publicity purposes (especially in the group's early days), the extent of Keith Richards' drug abuse over the last several decades would be hard to exaggerate: long periods of drug use and addiction, punctuated with occasional efforts at beating the drug habit.  These efforts ranged from going cold turkey to submitting to conventional medical means of ending addiction to undergoing controversial "experimental" cures.  Whatever the method, the results were generally the same: Richards would quit before the end of the program or lapse back into his familiar habits soon afterwards.  Although drugs have long been considered an indispensable part of the "rock 'n' roll lifestyle," too much of a good thing can be detrimental, even to rock musicians.  The Rolling Stones have been a top concert draw for thirty-five years and owe much of their popularity (not to mention their income) to their live shows.  But the Rolling Stones are not the Rolling Stones without a functioning Keith Richards, and at times his overindulgences have put concert tours in jeopardy due to his inability to weather rigorous and demanding tour schedules.  Such was the situation during the Stones' 1973 European tour, when Richards needed to kick a heroin addiction quickly and underwent a treatment in Switzerland that lead to rumors he had undergone the human equivalent of an automotive oil change and beat his drug habit by having all his blood replaced.  As Stones intimate Spanish Tony Sanchez later described the process in his tell-all book about the band: In the midst of this chaos it was time for the Stones to finalize plans for their seven-week tour of Britain and Europe. Keith knew that he was in no condition to go on the road, but there was no time for a cure. Withdrawing would have meant being laid up for weeks  and that was out of the question. Marshall Chess, however, had a solution. "There's a doctor from Florida who can get you off dope in a few days by changing your blood," he told Keith. "He did it for me in Mexico a while back, and it worked perfectly." The Florida doctor would carry out the blood change for Keith in a villa called Le Pec Varp, in Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. Keith would fly directly to Switzerland after the Stones' concert in Birmingham on September 19. He would then be cured in time to play with the Stones again in Berne, Switzerland, on September 26. Marshall was going to Switzerland with Keith to have his blood changed at the same time. Sanchez went on to describe exactly how much Richards paid the Florida doctor, where he stayed during the treatment process, and what his hotel room cost.   Sanchez's accuracy leaves something to be desired, however  although Richards admitted the bare facts of Sanchez's book were true, of the details he said, "I couldn't plow through it all because my eyes were watering from laughter."  And the truth in this case follows that pattern: the basic facts are true, but the details have been embellished just a bit. Richards biographer Victor Bockris described the actual treatment process: The treatment involved a hemodialysis process in which the patient's blood was passed through a pump, where it was separated from sterile dialysis fluid by a semipermeable membrane. This allowed any toxic substances that had built up in the bloodstream, which would normally have been secreted by the kidneys, to diffuse out of the blood into the dialysis fluid. (According to Bockris, this treatment took place between the Rolling Stones' 23 September 1973 concert in Innsbruck, Austria, and their show in Berne, Switzerland three days later.   This coincides with his statement that "Richards was frightened by the process because it required being put to sleep for three days," but according to a Rolling Stones tour chronology, the group also performed in Berne on 25 September, which wouldn't have allowed for alleged "three days" of sleep the cure required.  Another passage in Sanchez's book, probably inaccurate, quotes Richards as saying the process took only forty-eight hours, but also mentions that he "spent the rest of the week just resting and building up" his strength.  Obviously Richards couldn't have taken off "the rest of the week" to recuperate and still have performed in a show that took place two days after the treatment began.) Bockris also claims that when Richards was having trouble obtaining a visa for the Rolling Stones' 1975 tour of the United States, Walter Annenberg, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, "helped arrange for Keith to get a visa so long as the U.S. embassy doctor in London could certify that there were no drugs in his bloodstream." So, once again Richards supposedly made the trip to Switzerland to have his blood purified in order to pass the requisite medical certification. Keith Richards himself later explained how the rumor about his "blood change" treatment began: Someone asked me how I cleaned up, so I told them I went to Switzerland and had my blood completely changed. I was just fooling around. I opened my jacket and said, 'How do you like my blood change?' That's all it was, a joke. I was fucking sick of answering that question. So I gave them a story. Of course, Richards doesn't exactly declare in the above statement that he really went to Switzerland; he merely claims that he told people he went to Switzerland.  So, did Richards have his blood changed, did he have it filtered, or is the whole thing a bit of lurid fiction?  The "blood change" claim is almost certainly untrue, because Richards himself says he made up the story, no real evidence supports it, and such a procedure is medically questionable in terms of both safety and effectiveness.  He probably did undergo some type of treatment involving blood filtering, however. True or not, the story's ubiquity is no mystery.  What's more extravagant and outrageous than a jaded rock star who has achieved international fame and has earned all money he could possibly need, yet chooses to spend his days in a drugged stupor?  A rock star who kicks the habit not by sweating it out cold turkey or by spending several weeks in a substance abuse program to kick both the physical habit and his psychological dependency on drugs, but by jetting off to Europe to swap his "dirty" blood for some fresh, clean stuff and be on his (temporarily drug-free) way in a couple of days.   Although Tony Sanchez may have made up or embellished many of his tales about his days with the Rolling Stones, he hit the nail on the head with an expression of outrage that neatly summarizes the essence of public's fascination with this legend: I couldn't help wondering where all this blood was coming from or resenting the decadence of debauched millionaires regaining their health, vampirelike, from the fresh, clean blood of innocents. Last updated:  16 May 2007    Sources:   Bockris, Victor.  Keith Richards.   New York: Poseidon Press, 1992.  ISBN 0-8160-3547-4  (pp. 211-212, 234).  Keith Richards    Karnbach, James and Carol Bernson.  It's Only Rock 'n' Roll.   New York: Facts on File, 1997.  ISBN 0-8160-3547-4  (pp. 144-147).  It's Only Rock 'n' Roll    Sanchez, Tony.  Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.   New York: William Morrow, 1979.  ISBN 0-306-80711-4  (pp. 281-284). Up and Down with the Rolling Stones ]In May 2015, a fraudulent offer for $200 Home Depot coupons started circulating on Facebook. The message contained a link that redirected bargain hunters to a web site adorned with Home Depot's logo that has nothing to do with the real Home Depot:   The $200 Home Depot coupon scam is very similar to other schemes that targeted Costco, Amazon, and Kroger shoppers. While each scam has slight variations, they all feature three main components. First, they require people to like or share the message on Facebook in an attempt to spread the scam around the Internet. Second, they direct people to complete a survey that extracts personal information such as email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and credit card numbers. Lastly, these scams never end with a "free" rewards, because users must first agree to sign up for several costly, difficult-to-cancel "Reward Offers" hidden in the fine print to claim their coupons. Costco Amazon Kroger In April 2017, another Facebook coupon scam targeted Home Depot. In that iteration the chain was purportedly doling out $50 coupons "to celebrate Mother's Day, and links directed users to www.homedepot.com-grabitnow.us (a URL clearly unaffiliated with the legitimate Home Depot website): Home Depot   Home Depot didn't address the 2017 Facebook coupon scam on their social media channels as of 24 April 2017, but it was nevertheless clearly not a legitimate promotion affiliated with the chain. The Better Business Bureau gave these three tips to identify scams on Facebook: Facebook Don't believe what you see. It's easy to steal the colors, logos and header of an established organization. Scammers can also make links look like they lead to legitimate websites and emails appear to come from a different sender.Legitimate businesses do not ask for credit card numbers or banking information on customer surveys. If they do ask for personal information, like an address or email, be sure there's a link to their privacy policy. Watch out for a reward that's too good to be true. If the survey is real, you may be entered in a drawing to win a gift card or receive a small discount off your next purchase. Few businesses can afford to give away $50 gift cards for completing a few questions. Claim:  The drawback of a laborer's illiteracy frees him to become a success in another field. LEGEND Example:  [Brunvand, 1993] My grandfather used to tell  about a country lad who went to the big city to seek his fortune, but had no luck finding a job.  One day, wandering through the red light district, he spotted a Help Wanted sign in a window. They were looking for a bookkeeper, but after the madam quizzed the boy about his education and discovered that he could neither read or write, she turned him away. Feeling sorry for him, she gave him two big red apples as he left.  A few blocks down the street, he placed the apples on top of a garbage can while tying his shoe, and a stranger came along and offered to buy them. The boy took the money to a produce market and bought a dozen more apples,which he sold quickly.  Eventually he parlayed his fruit sales into a grocery store, then a string of supermarkets.  Eventually he became the wealthiest man in the state. Finally he was named Man of the Year, and during an interview a journalist discovered that his subject could neither read or write. "Good Lord, Sir," he said.  "What do you suppose you would have become if you had ever learned to read and write?" "Well," he answered, "I guess I would have been a bookkeeper in a whorehouse."1 Origins:  According to folklorist Jan Brunvand, after writer Somerset Maugham was accused of stealing the plot of his 1929 short story "The Verger," he explained that he'd heard the tale from a friend and that it was a well known bit of Jewish folklore.  Maugham's claim is supported by this find, harvested from a 1923 joke book: Some fifteen years ago there landed in New York a friendless and almost penniless Russian immigrant who found lodgings on the East Side and at once, with racial perseverance and energy, set out to earn a living. He was of a likeable disposition, and speedily made acquaintances who sought to aid him in his ambition.  One of them sponsored him for the vacant post of janitor, or shammos, to use the common Hebraic word, of a little synagogue on a side street.  But when the officers of the congregation found out the applicant was  entirely illiterate they reluctantly denied him employment, inasmuch as a shammos must keep certain records.  The greenhorn quickly rallied from his disappointment.  He got a job somewhere.  He prospered.  Presently he became a dabbler in real estate. Within ten years he was one of the largest independent operators in East Side tenement-house property and popularly rated as a millionaire.  An occasion arose when he needed a large amount of money to swing what promised to be a profitable deal.  Finding himself for the moment short of cash, he went to the East Side branch of one of the large banks. It was the first time in his entire business career that he had found it necessary to borrow extensively.  He explained his position to the manager, who knew of his success, and asked for a loan of fifty thousand dollars. "I'll be very glad to accommodate you, Mr. Rabin," said the banker.  "Just sit down there at that desk and make out a note for the amount." The caller smiled an embarrassed smile.  "If you please," he said, "you should be so good as to make out the note and then I should sign it." "What's the idea?" inquired the bank manager, puzzled. "Vell, you see," he confessed, "I haf to tell you somethings: Myself, I cannot read and write.  My vife, she has taught me how to make my own name on paper, but otherwise, with me, reading and writing is nix." In amazement, the banker stared at him. "Well, well, well!" he murmured admiringly.  "And yet, handicapped as you've been, inside of a few years you have become a rich man!  I wonder what you'd have been by now if only you had been able to read and write?" "A shammos," said Mr. Rabin modestly.2 Some like to question the legend's basis on the grounds that if the work-seeker couldn't read, he couldn't have made out what the sign in the window said. "Illiterate" is often mistakenly interpreted as "incapable of making head or tail out of so much as one written word." In real life, any number of folks who cannot read and thus have no hope of making sense of a printed page have learned to recognize by sight a goodly number of key words and phrases, including "help wanted." The illiterate among us manage to catch the right buses, "read" road signs, and order off menus, all by way of having memorized what certain words look like. They exist in mainstream society undetected for years, sometimes fooling even their immediate families. A good story never goes out of style, as this example shows: [Collected on the Internet, 2001] An unemployed man goes to apply for a job with Microsoft as a janitor. The manager there arranges for him to take an aptitude test  (Floors, sweeping and cleaning). After the test, the manager says, "You will be employed at minimum wage, $5.15 an hour. Let me have your e-mail address, so that I can send you a form to complete and tell you where to report forwork on your first day. Taken aback, the man protests that he has neither a computer nor an e-mail address. To this the MS manager replies, "Well, then, that means that you virtually don't exist and can therefore hardlyexpect to be employed. Stunned, the man leaves. Not knowing where to turn and having only $10 in his wallet, he decides to buy a 25 lb. flat of tomatoes at the supermarket. Within less than 2 hours, he sells all the tomatoes individually at 100% profit. Repeating the process several times more that day, he ends up with almost $100 before going to sleep that night. And thus it dawns on him that he could quite easily make a living selling tomatoes. Getting up early every day and going to bed late, he multiplies his profits quickly. After a short time he acquires a cart to transport several dozen boxes of tomatoes, only to have to trade it in again so that he can buy a pickup truck to support his expanding business. By the end of the second year, he is the owner of a fleet of pickup trucks and manages a staff of a hundred former unemployed people, all selling tomatoes. Planning for the future of his wife and children, he decides to buy some life insurance. Consulting with an insurance adviser, he picks an insurance plan to fit his new circumstances. At the end of the telephone conversation, the adviser asks him for his e-mail address to send the final documents electronically. When the man replies that he has no e-mail, the adviser is stunned, "What, you don't have e-mail? How on earth have you managed to amass such wealth without the Internet, e-mail and e-commerce? Just imagine where you would be now, if you had been connected to the internet from the very start!" After a moment of thought, the tomato millionaire replied, "Why, of course! I would be a floor cleaner at Microsoft!" Moral of this story: 1. The Internet, e-mail and e-commerce do not need to rule your life.  2. If you don't have e-mail, but work hard, you can still become a millionaire. 3. Since you got this story via e-mail, you're probably closer to becoming a janitor than you are to becoming a millionaire. 4. If you do have a computer and e-mail, you probably have already been taken to the cleaners by Microsoft. The   legend's message is twofold: that sometimes seeming adversity is actually the Hand of God arranging future events in our favor, and that often the most momentous decisions we make swing on little more than the expediency of the moment. Taking the second point first, we observe that if the young farm boy in the first example had been able to read and write, he would have gained the job he sought, that of a bookkeeper in a brothel, and thus would never have become the grocery tycoon he ultimately turned out to be. As to what led him to seek the bookkeeping position, he quite by happenstance chose to walk down a particular street, coincidentally on a day when a "Help Wanted" sign was posted in one of the windows. On another day, that sign wouldn't have been there, or he would already have had a job somewhere else.  It is ever thus  the directions of lives change depending upon which ad is answered, which interview is given, even which bus is taken. A chance encounter can lead to a marriage and the begetting of children, and just as certainly the slightly different choice of ad or bus can result in those two people's never meeting. Career direction is likewise up for grabs. As much as we like to feel we're masters of our fate, often we're the very last factor to have much influence on unfolding events, even within the confines of our own lives. But there's another message to this legend, one of the power of divine intervention and why it doesn't pay to second-guess God.  Today's disappointment can be a necessary, though momentarily painful, ingredient in tomorrow's success, as the snubbed bookkeeper or janitor finds out. Children of the moment that we are, we tend to forget this truth when caught up in sorrow over not getting what we'd set our hearts on, and tend only to remember it again when things ultimately turn out far better than they would have if we'd gotten our shortsighted way.  Barbara "father of the chide" Mikkelson Sightings:  In Somerset Maugham's 1929 short story "The Verger," an illiterate church caretaker is fired by the vicar when his lack of education comes to light. The ousted verger goes on to become a tobacconist, eventually owning a string of shops in London. Last updated:  20 April 2011 The Baby Train   2.  Cobb, Irvin S.  A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away. Asimov Laughs Again   Botkin, B.A.  Sidewalks of America.  Indianapolis-New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1954  (pp. 430-431).   The Big Book of Urban Legends.  New York: Paradox Press, 1994.  ISBN 1-56389-165-4  (p. 196). The Big Book of Urban Legends Claim:  Six outrageous-but-real lawsuits showcase the need for tort reform. Status:  False. Example:  [Collected on the Internet, 2001] This is what's wrong with the world:        1. January 2000: Kathleen Robertson of Austin Texas was awarded $780,000.00 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running amuck inside a furniture store.  The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving tyke was Ms. Robertson's son. 2. June 1998: A 19 year old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000.00 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran his hand over with a Honda Accord.  Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice someone was at the wheel of the car whose hubcap he was trying to steal. 3. October 1998: A Terrence Dickson of Bristol Pennsylvania was exiting a house he finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up, because the automatic door opener was malfunctioning.  He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, so Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food.  This upset Mr. Dickson, so he sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of half a million dollars and change. 4. October 1999: Jerry Williams of Little Rock Arkansas was awarded $14,500.00 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced-in yard, as was Mr. Williams. The award was less than sought after because the jury felt the dog may have been provoked by Mr. Williams who, at the time, was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun. 5. May 2000: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania $113,500.00 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her coccyx. The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson threw it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument. 6. December 1997: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth.  This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000.00 and dental expenses. Origins:   This "and you wonder what's wrong with the world today?" whinge appeared on the Internet in May 2001. All of the entries in the list are fabrications: a search for news stories about each of these cases failed to turn up anything, as did a search for each law case.  The earliest version concluded with a seventh item that has since been snipped away, likely after someone noticed it was the venerable microwaved poodle legend. Its inclusion would have immediately called into question the truthfulness of the other six cases for any number of folks familiar with urban legends. The remaining six were still false, but they weren't as obviously false as the following poodle tale and thus wouldn't have set the alarm bells ringing: microwaved 7. And just so you know that cooler heads do occasionally prevail: Kenmore Inc., the makers of Dorothy Johnson's microwave, were found not liable for the death of Mrs. Johnson's poodle after she gave it a bath and attempted to dry it by putting the poor creature in her microwave for, "just a few minutes, on low,"  The case was quickly dismissed. A version of the list that began circulating in the spring of 2002 has yet another urban legend included as its final item, the venerable cruise control legend: cruise control In November 2000, Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32 foot Winnebago motor home. On his first trip home, having joined the freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of coffee. Not surprisingly, the Winnie left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mr. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him in the handbook that he could not actually do this. He was awarded  $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago. Some versions bear the following footer, although many omit it: PLEASE ASSIST OUR LAW OFFICES IN A TORT REFORM PROGRAM.  WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO PUT A STOP TO THESE INSANE JURY AWARDS BY SENDING THIS E-MAIL OUT TO THE PUBLIC IN THE HOPES OF SWAYING PUBLIC OPINION.  PLEASE FORWARD IT TO EVERY EMAIL ADDRESS YOU KNOW.Mary R. Hogelmen, Esq.Law Offices of Hogelmen, Hogelmen, and ThomasDayton Ohio Mary R. Hogelmen, Esq.Law Offices of Hogelmen, Hogelmen, and ThomasDayton Ohio There is no law firm of Hogelmen, Hogelmen, and Thomas in Dayton, Ohio, as a call to directory assistance quickly confirmed. This detail was included to give the mailing credibility in the eyes of those who received it: if a law firm had pulled this list together to build grassroots support for its tort reform program, then it went without saying a pack of lawyers had properly researched each item and were guaranteeing the information provided. But of course this detail was as false as everything else in the e-mail. Speaking about implied credibility, we note that the "outrageous lawsuits" list has made it into the newspapers at times, which only works to add to the perception that the information given in it is reliable. In June 2002, the New York Daily News presented it solely as an e-mail it had received, making no statements as to its likeliness to be real or detailing any attempts that publication might have made to verify any of the entries. (Had such attempts been made, the Daily News would have quickly found the article you're now reading, which originally appeared on this site a full ten months prior to the Daily News piece.) Fake or not, a list of outrageous awards bestowed upon those whose actions  nay, misbehaviors  had brought them to grief would fall upon very receptive ears because current feeling is very much against large jury awards for frivolous claims. This e-mail preaches to the choir in that it "confirms" what is already deeply believed. Numerous states have enacted measures to reform their civil law systems in response to the problem of frivolous lawsuits and runaway jury awards. Tort reform usually amounts to placing a cap on punitive damage awards, making the state's joint-and-several liability law more equitable, and limiting judge and court shopping (which means cases are tried in front of whomever they've been assigned to rather than the judge the plaintiff figures will be most sympathetic). Though the cases described in the e-mail are fake, real lawsuits of equal silliness can be found in abundance. An equally impressive list could easily have been compiled by anyone with access to a news database and a few moments to spare. For instance:  In March 1995, a San Diego man unsuccessfully attempted to sue the city and Jack Murphy Stadium for $5.4 million over something that can only be described as a wee problem: Robert Glaser claimed the stadium's unisex bathroom policy at a Billy Joel and Elton John concert caused him embarrassment and emotional distress thanks to the sight of a woman using a urinal in front of him. He subsequently tried "six or seven" other bathrooms in the stadium only to find women in all of them. He asserted he "had to hold it in for four hours" because he was too embarrassed to share the public bathrooms with women.  A San Carlos, California, man sued the Escondido Public Library for $1.5 million. His dog, a 50-pound Labrador mix, was attacked November 2000 by the library's 12-pound feline mascot, L.C., (also known as Library Cat). The case was heard in January 2004, with the jury finding for the defendant. In a further case which was resolved in July 2004, the plaintiff in the previous suit was ordered to pay the city $29,362.50, which amounted to 75% of its legal fees associated with that case.  In 1994, a student at the University of Idaho unsuccessfully sued that institution over his fall from a third-floor dorm window. He'd been mooning other students when the window gave way. It was contended the University failed to provide a safe environment for students or to properly warn them of the dangers inherent to upper-story windows.  In 1993, McDonald's was unsuccessfully sued over a car accident in New Jersey. While driving, a man who had placed a milkshake between his legs, leaned over to reach into his bag of food and squeezed the milkshake container in the process. When the lid popped off and spilled half the drink in his lap, this driver became distracted and ran into another man's car. That man in turn tried to sue McDonald's for causing the accident, saying the restaurant should have cautioned the man who had hit him against eating while driving. Although the cases cited above were all eventually dismissed, they still managed to work their way at least partway through our court system. When we hear such stories, it's hard not to be rabidly in favor of tort reform  these kinds of cases make it appear that the idiots have taken over the asylum and only the rapid institution of some rules is going to bring things back into a semblance of sanity. Yet this solution is not all skittles and beer; many see such changes as potentially denying those in need of legal remedy their day in court and refusing them their right to be heard. The cap on jury awards is also viewed by some as unfair to the seriously injured, who may well require a large sum to afford the cost of living with whatever disability someone else's negligence or recklessness left them with. Capped awards are also scant deterrent to large corporations who could easily afford the judgments against them and therefore have little reason to mend their ways. Big Business is poised to benefit under tort reform in that it will no longer need to fear the courts. It can also be argued that the need for tort reform is overblown. Only rarely do ridiculous lawsuits result in windfalls for the plaintiff; these cases are almost always either thrown out or the judgment goes for the defendant. Some celebrated "outrageous" suits wherein judgment went for the plaintiff prove upon closer examination to be far less "outrageous" than originally presented in the media.  (For example, the "woman scalded by hot coffee" suit, which at first blush looked like the height of frivolity proved to be a perfectly legitimate action taken against a corporation that knew, thanks to a string of similar scaldings it had quietly been paying off, that its coffee was not just hot, but dangerously hot. The Consumer Attorneys of California provides a good description of this case). this case Tort reform thus has both its advocates and its adversaries. On the one hand, we bridle at the thought of the terminally clueless being rewarded for their folly  that strikes us as just plain wrong. We also fear for the continued wellbeing of the small- to mid-sized business which can ill afford to fend off one frivolous lawsuit after another and thus stands in danger of being litigated to death. Also, even when litigants do not prevail, costs associated with their suits rain down onto the average citizen through his taxes (some of which underwrite the judicial system) and through increased prices for goods produced by firms who had to mount legal defenses.  Yet on the other hand, we don't want to see those who have legitimate cause denied their right to sue (or in the case of the seriously injured, their right to sue for an appropriate amount). We also don't want to see corporations run unchecked, free to turn out whatever dangerous product they like because the combination of capped awards and their deep pockets render them bulletproof. It's a complicated issue, one not made any easier to make sense of by lists of fake cases of horrendous miscarriages of justice. One has to wonder why someone is so busy trying to stir up outrage and who or what that outrage would ultimately benefit. Additional information:  George W. Bush's first act upon becoming the Governor of Texas was to reform that state's civil justice system. In January 1995, just after being sworn in, he convened a session of the Legislature to tackle tort reform. Within weeks he signed bills to limit punitive damages to $750,000, cut down on "venue shopping" for favorable judges and juries, and made it easier for judges to impose sanctions on plaintiffs who file frivolous suits.  Sightings:  The "woman in a store trips over a toddler, then sues the store" fiction was incorporated into an episode of the television drama Boston Legal ("Tabloid Nation," original air date 8 April 2008). Last updated:  11 April 2008    Sources:   Associated Press.  "Men's Room Invasion Prompts Suit."   The Fresno Bee.  1 April 1995  (p. F8).     Coile, Zachary.  "Bush's Formula to Win Over Business."   The San Francisco Examiner.  2 October 2000  (p. A1).     Elias, Paul.  "So What's a Little Litigation Between Friends?"   The Recorder.  14 December 1999  (Court Watch; p. 4).     Heller, Jonathan.  "Man Seeks $1.5 Million from City; Says Library Cat Attacked His Dog."   The San Diego Union-Tribune.  5 May 2001  (p. B2).     Littlefield, Dana.  "Suit Over Library Cat's Attack Bites Back at disabled Dog Owner."   The San Diego Union-Tribune.  31 July 2004  (p. NC3).     Perkins, Joseph.  "We All Pay When Others File Frivolous Lawsuits."   The San Diego Union-Tribune.  18 May 2001  (p. B7).     Perry, Tony.  "A One-Man Campaign for More Women's Restrooms."   Los Angeles Times.  18 August 1995  (p. A3).     Riffel, James.  "Jury Rejects Claims of Disabled Man Against City for Cat Attack."   City News Service.  30 January 2004.     Vogt, Andrea.  "Ludicrous Lawsuit Against University of Idaho Rears Its Ugly Head."   Lewiston Morning Tribune.  2 August 1994  (p. A1).     New Jersey Lawyer.  "Moral of a Burger Suit: Don't Eat and Drive."   15 November 1993  (p. 3).     [New York] Daily News.  "Mighty Quinn."   25 June 2002  (Sports, p. 63). During ongoing national debate over a novel policy of separating families at the border, a photograph circulated (originally from Joshua Feuerstein, a self-styled "American evangelist, Internet and social media personality" who last made headlines in 2015 when he manufactured a so-called "Christmas cup controversy") that purportedly depicted a room full of immigrant children that former President Barack Obama had supposedly removed from their parents' custody: novel policy a photograph circulated self-styled Christmas cup controversy immigrant children The attached text read:As you stare at this picture of innocent children being separated from their parents at the border and feel your hatred toward President Trump start to boil over from the bowels of your soul...I'd just like to point out it was taken in 2014 .. when Obama was President! #shareSome versions were shared with no accompanying text, inviting readers to project their own interpretation onto the image:Images of its type (dated to the Obama administration) were often described as having been ignored at the time they were originally taken. However, this image did appear in anti-immigration memes from 2014 and 2015, such as one framing the photograph as evidence the Obama administration (described here as a "cabal") was encouraging ("seducing") immigrant ("illegal alien") children to come to the United States:The meme's text read:INSIDE AN OBAMA APPROVED REFUGEE CAMP140,000 Illegal Alien Children Seduced into coming to America By the Obama Cabal. MORE COMING NEXT YEAR TOOHey Obama.. Why not use the FEMA CAMPS??Or are those being prepped for Patriot Resistance Fighters!!The first iteration we could find of that image was alongside a 5 June 2014 post published by Breitbart. Although Breitbart shared the photograph on Facebook on 21 June 2018, the outlet did not include a link to its earlier reporting. In its original article, the children were described as "unaccompanied," indicating that they came without their parents, not that they were separated from their families by American authorities:Breitbart Texas obtained internal federal government photos depicting the conditions of foreign children warehoused by authorities on U.S. soil on Wednesday night. Thousands of illegal immigrants have overrun U.S. border security and their processing centers in Texas along the U.S./Mexico border. Unaccompanied minors, including young girls under the age of 12, are making the dangerous journey from Central America and Mexico, through cartel-controlled territories, and across the porous border onto U.S. soil.The photograph was subsequently disseminated by numerous web sites and news outlets. National Review's "Immigration Bedlam" said of the children in the photo:Some 6,775 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) crossed the U.S.Mexican border in 2011, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement reports. (The first bar in the ORRs chart, above, should read 20032011.) ORR expects 60,000 UACs this year. This number could reach 130,000 in 2015. Detaining them for $252 each, per day, will cost taxpayers $453.6 million per month this year and could cost $982.8 million per month next year.The image and events around it were widely reported for several months, appearing in the Houston Chronicle, Splinter News, the Los Angeles Times, Mashable, and Reuters, among others.Stories during that time specifically reiterated that the photographs showed unaccompanied minor children in the custody of United States Customs and Border Protection and temporarily housed at a Texas Air Force base:The photos have a timestamp of May 27, 2014.A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency has not officially released any photos at this time in order to protect the rights and privacy of unaccompanied minors in our care.... A temporary shelter at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland has housed and provided services to 1,820 unaccompanied minors from Central America since May 18, San Antonio Express-News reporter Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje reported. The immigration is part of a surge of children said to be fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries, she reported.Although the photograph is real, it does not show children separated from their parents by the Obama administration. In June 2014, the image was published as part of numerous news stories (and occasionally alongside editorial pieces objecting to the presence of the unaccompanied minor children.) The image did not develop a different backstory until June 2018, during a controversy that specifically involved family separation at the behest of the Trump administration.  The attached text read: As you stare at this picture of innocent children being separated from their parents at the border and feel your hatred toward President Trump start to boil over from the bowels of your soul...I'd just like to point out it was taken in 2014 .. when Obama was President! #share Some versions were shared with no accompanying text, inviting readers to project their own interpretation onto the image: Images of its type (dated to the Obama administration) were often described as having been ignored at the time they were originally taken. However, this image did appear in anti-immigration memes from 2014 and 2015, such as one framing the photograph as evidence the Obama administration (described here as a "cabal") was encouraging ("seducing") immigrant ("illegal alien") children to come to the United States: described   The meme's text read: INSIDE AN OBAMA APPROVED REFUGEE CAMP 140,000 Illegal Alien Children Seduced into coming to America By the Obama Cabal. MORE COMING NEXT YEAR TOO Hey Obama.. Why not use the FEMA CAMPS??Or are those being prepped for Patriot Resistance Fighters!! The first iteration we could find of that image was alongside a 5 June 2014 post published by Breitbart. Although Breitbart shared the photograph on Facebook on 21 June 2018, the outlet did not include a link to its earlier reporting. In its original article, the children were described as "unaccompanied," indicating that they came without their parents, not that they were separated from their families by American authorities: published Breitbart Breitbart unaccompanied Breitbart Texas obtained internal federal government photos depicting the conditions of foreign children warehoused by authorities on U.S. soil on Wednesday night. Thousands of illegal immigrants have overrun U.S. border security and their processing centers in Texas along the U.S./Mexico border. Unaccompanied minors, including young girls under the age of 12, are making the dangerous journey from Central America and Mexico, through cartel-controlled territories, and across the porous border onto U.S. soil. The photograph was subsequently disseminated by numerous web sites and news outlets. National Review's "Immigration Bedlam" said of the children in the photo: National Review Immigration Bedlam Some 6,775 unaccompanied alien children (UAC) crossed the U.S.Mexican border in 2011, the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement reports. (The first bar in the ORRs chart, above, should read 20032011.) ORR expects 60,000 UACs this year. This number could reach 130,000 in 2015. Detaining them for $252 each, per day, will cost taxpayers $453.6 million per month this year and could cost $982.8 million per month next year. The image and events around it were widely reported for several months, appearing in the Houston Chronicle, Splinter News, the Los Angeles Times, Mashable, and Reuters, among others. widely reported Houston Chronicle Splinter News Los Angeles Times Mashable Reuters Stories during that time specifically reiterated that the photographs showed unaccompanied minor children in the custody of United States Customs and Border Protection and temporarily housed at a Texas Air Force base: The photos have a timestamp of May 27, 2014. A spokesperson for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency has not officially released any photos at this time in order to protect the rights and privacy of unaccompanied minors in our care. ... A temporary shelter at Joint Base San Antonio Lackland has housed and provided services to 1,820 unaccompanied minors from Central America since May 18, San Antonio Express-News reporter Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje reported. The immigration is part of a surge of children said to be fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries, she reported. Although the photograph is real, it does not show children separated from their parents by the Obama administration. In June 2014, the image was published as part of numerous news stories (and occasionally alongside editorial pieces objecting to the presence of the unaccompanied minor children.) The image did not develop a different backstory until June 2018, during a controversy that specifically involved family separation at the behest of the Trump administration. family separation DeRuy, Emily and Jorge Rivas.  "Disturbing Photos Allegedly Show Texas Border Patrol Facility Packed With Immigrant Children."
  Splinter.  6 June 2014. Darby, Brandon.  "Leaked Images Reveal Children Warehoused In Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed."
  Breitbart.  5 June 2014. Hennessy-Fiske, Molly.  "Hundreds Of Migrant Youths Held At Texas Military Base."
  Los Angeles Times.  5 June 2014. Murdock, Deroy.  "Immigration Bedlam."
  National Review.   13 June 2014. Parker, Kolten.  "Leaked Photos Show Immigrant Children Packed In Crowded Texas Border Facilities."
  Houston Chronicle.  6 June 2014. Roug, Louise.  "How The U.S. Border Became A Humanitarian Crisis."
  Mashable.  8 July 2014. Reuters.  "U.S. To Open Third Military Base To Illegal Child Immigrants."
  9 June 2014 A considerable number of people on the internet appear to believe that a food item known as the club sandwich got its name from the acronym of its most common ingredients: "Chicken and Lettuce Under Bacon."  While there's a modicum of logic and precedent to this notion (after all, "BLT" is an acronym for "Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato"), history doesn't support it. Quite the opposite.  Club sandwiches have been around for a long, long time. There are references to the popular lunch item and recipes for making it in published sources dating back to the 1890s. Here, for example, is a club sandwich recipe from Janet McKenzie Hill's "Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties," published in 1899:  Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties  Despite the club sandwich's culinary longevity, however, the theory that it was named for its ingredients appears to be no older than the late 1990s, and may well have originated on the internet. We scoured book and periodical archives and found no references to any version of "chicken and lettuce under bacon" in any text published prior to 2018.  Etymologist Barry Popik reports finding this "Chicken Lettuce Under Bacon" reference posted in a Google Groups discussion dated Dec. 8, 1998:  Barry Popik reports finding posted in a Google Groups discussion  As of this writing, we've not been able to find any published mentions predating this. In another blog post, Popik flatly asserts that "club" sandwich is not, in fact, an acronym, but rather a "backronym" (or "back acronym," meaning the claim was made after the fact). Based on our own research, we agree. another blog post backronym So, where did the name "club sandwich" really come from? Popik writes:  writes The club sandwich probably originated at the Union Club of the City of New York in the 1880s. The World (New York, NY) printed on November 18, 1889: Have you trie[d] a Union Club sandwich yet? Two toasted slices of Graham bread, with a layer of turkey or chicken and ham between them, served warm. Union Club member Ely Goddard (1853-1910) was given credit for the sandwich in articles in the New York (NY) Herald in 1891 and 1893, but a chef at the club also could have originated it. Hill, Janet McKenzie. Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties: With Thirty-Two Illustrations of Original Dishes. Little, Brown, 1899. Martin, Gary. Club Sandwich - the Meaning and Origin of This Phrase. Phrasefinder, https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/club-sandwich.html. Accessed 2 Sept. 2022. Popik, Barry. "Club Sandwich (Club House Sandwich; Clubhouse Sandwich)." https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/club_sandwich/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2022. Popik, Barry. "Chicken Lettuce Under Bacon ("club sandwich backronym)."  https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/chicken_lettuce_under_bacon/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2022.