Harry Reid, Chinese Company Behind Nevada Ranch Standoff
Claim:  Senator Harry Reid and a Chinese company building a solar plant are behind a standoff between federal agents and a Nevada rancher.  Examples:  [Collected via Facebook, April 2014] Site are reporting that Harry Reid is in cahoots with ENN a Chinese firm for which his son works to take over the range area in dispute with that Nevada rancher and the Bureau of Land Management. Is there any truth here?  The Bundy Ranch in NV standoff with BLM is being attributed to Harry Reid's desire to help his son secure rights for a Chinese company to build a solar energy farm in the Nevada desert. It's making it's rounds on Facebook and, of course, the internet. Origins:  April 2014 saw the publicizing of a decades-old dispute between the federal government and Cliven Bundy, a cattle rancher in Nevada, over grazing rights on public land. Back in 1993, Cliven Bundy began declining to pay the government fees required to allow his cattle to graze on public lands, and in 1998, as part of an effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise found in that area, the government obtained the issuance of a court order requiring Bundy to take his cows off that land.  In July 2013, a federal court finally ordered Bundy to get his cattle off public land within 45 days or risk having them confiscated by the government and sold to pay off the fees and trespassing fines (reportedly in excess of $1.2 million) that he owes: Bundy does not recognize federal authority over land where his ancestors first settled in the 1880s, which he claims belongs to the state of Nevada. The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] disagreed and took him to federal court, which first ruled in favor of the BLM in 1998. After years of attempts at a negotiated settlement over the $1.2 million Bundy owes in fees failed, federal land agents began seizing hundreds of his cattle illegally grazing on public land. Bundy's claim that the land belongs to Nevada or Clark County didn't hold up in court, nor did his claim of inheriting an ancestral right to use the land that pre-empts the BLM's role. As Bundy did not comply with the court order, the confiscation of his cattle began in April 2014, precipitating a tense standoff between Bundy's supporters and law enforcement officials. (The government eventually relented and released about 400 head of cattle it had seized from Bundy.) confiscation Somewhere along the way in the reporting of this brouhaha, the conspiracy theory arose that the showdown between Cliven Bundy and the federal government wasn't really about grazing cattle or endangered tortoises, but was actually about a deal between Harry Reid, the senior U.S. Senator from Nevada (and the current U.S. Majority Leader), and a Chinese company eager to build a solar plant on the disputed land: conspiracy theory As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal. The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy's family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Reid and his eldest son, reports indicate, were integral in the support and/or implementation of a $5 billion solar plant being built in the county by a Chinese company. Reid has been outspoken in support of the government's position on the Bundy issue, and both he and his son Rory were in earlier years prominent advocates of efforts by ENN Mojave Energy LLC (a Chinese-backed company) to build a solar plant in Clark County: outspoken Questions surrounding family ties are flaring again in Nevada around the Senate majority leader. He and his oldest son, Rory, are both involved in an effort by a Chinese energy giant, ENN Energy Group, to build a $5 billion solar farm and panel manufacturing plant in the southern Nevada desert. Reid has been one of the project's most prominent advocates, helping recruit the company during a 2011 trip to China and applying his political muscle on behalf of the project in Nevada. His son, a lawyer with a prominent Las Vegas firm that is representing ENN, helped it locate a 9,000-acre (3,600-hectare) desert site that it is buying well below appraised value from Clark County, where Rory Reid formerly chaired the county commission. However, the theory that Reid's putative involvement in the Bundy dispute was motivated by a desire to somehow profit from the building of a solar plant falls flat in the face of two basic facts: The site that ENN Mojave Energy was planning to buy in order to build a solar plant is nowhere near the public land Bundy has been disputing with the government, and ENN gave up the solar project and terminated its agreement to buy land to house it as far back as June 2013: A Chinese-backed company is pulling the plug on a multibillion-dollar solar project near Laughlin after it was unable to find customers for the power that would have been generated there, a Clark County spokesman said. In a letter, an executive from ENN Mojave Energy LLC informed the county that the company was terminating its agreement to purchase 9,000 acres near Laughlin, stating that the "market will not support a project of this scale and nature at this time." The company, a  subsidiary of ENN Group, described as the largest energy company in China, said it was unable to sign the necessary power purchase agreements to sell the energy generated from the solar plant to utilities in Nevada or neighboring states. The project was broken down into phases, but if fully completed, it was expected to generate enough energy to power 200,000 homes with a price tag of $1 billion to $6 billion. The move was hailed as a much-needed boost for economic development in the southern part of the state and was projected to create up to 2,200 permanent jobs. Commissioners agreed to sell the land at $4.5 million  about a sixth of its appraised value  in December 2011 to jump-start the development, but they put in place an aggressive timeline that required ENN to secure the complicated power purchase agreements. With the solar project now just a mirage, commissioners will discuss what to do with the 9,000 acres of county-owned land at their July 2 meeting. Even the conservative Breitbart site debunked this conspiracy claim, noting: Breitbart Despite the obvious partisan gain to be had if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's son Rory (a failed 2010 Nevada gubernatorial candidate) had somehow been involved in a "land grab" affecting the Bundy family ranch operation  the facts just do not pan out as such. Indeed, Rory Reid did in fact have a hand in plans to reclassify federal lands for renewable energy developments. Just northeast of Las Vegas and Nellis Air Force Base, plans were drawn by Reid allies to potentially develop 5,717 acres of land for such use. While it would be fair to claim that such activity was in Bundy's relative neighborhood, the federal lands once leased by the family were more than 20 miles away, east of Overton, Nevada. Some versions of this conspiracy theory mistake the proposed ENN Mojave Energy site with that of the Moapa Southern Paiute Solar project, but the latter's 250MW solar power plant is already under construction (so there is no need to grab land for it), and, as noted in Wildlife News, the Moapa plant is being built near the Moapa Indian Reservation and not on public land disputed by Cliven Bundy: Moapa Southern Paiute Wildlife News A cursory search shows a sudden explosion of articles claiming Nevada's senior senator, Harry Reid, wants Bundy's land (all Bundy actually owns is a melon farm) to build a solar plant to enrich himself and his son.  Bundy has been trespassing over 750,000 acres of U.S. public land to the south of Mesquite and Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy's actual private property is his melon farm at Bunkerville, which looks like maybe 100 acres on Google Earth.  There is a solar farm. But it is not on the huge swath of land Bundy is trespassing on. The solar facility is actually under construction near the Moapa Indian Reservation about ten miles closer to Las Vegas. Likewise, another area currently being studied by BLM for the possible development of solar plants, commonly known as the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone, is sometimes mistakenly thrown into the conspiracy theory mix by persons who point to a BLM report listing "Cattle Trespass Impacts" and claim that it documents the BLM's intent to use the disputed land for solar development: Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone report Non-Governmental Organizations have expressed concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for offsite mitigation for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not durable with the presence of trespass cattle. But as explained at the Wildlife News, that isn't what the quoted blurb means: Wildlife News There is some feeble effort to try to mitigate the damage to wildlife [caused by solar development]. Some of it is near the sites of these solar mirrors. This is called "primary mitigation." Some is in a place distant to the solar power site. This is called "secondary mitigation."  Wildlife mitigation is things like planting grass wildlife need or like, development of new water sources for wildlife to drink, and restoration of rangeland overgrazed by cattle. All this bureaucratic language means is that private groups like the Western Watersheds Project,  Friends of Nevada Wilderness, Friends of Gold Butte and Friends of Joshua Tree Forest don't think the damage from solar power plants located elsewhere can be mitigated at Gold Butte because the cattle will tromp all over it. Last updated:   14 April 2014    Ford, Matt.  "The Irony of Cliven Bundy's Unconstitutional Stand."   The Atlantic.  14 April 2014.     Landau, Joel.  "Federal Government Stops Fight with Nevada Rancher Over Grazing Land."   [New York] Daily News.  12 April 2014.     Maughan, Ralph.  "Bundy's Land Is Not Solar Farm for Harry Reid."   Wildlife News.  13 April 2014.     Maughan, Ralph.  "Here Is the "Notorious" Missing BLM Page Connecting to Harry Reid."   Wildlife News.  15 April 2014.     Shine, Conor.  "Company Dumps Big Laughlin Solar Project, Says Market Won't Support It."   Las Vegas Sun.  14 June 2013.     Stern, Marcus.  "U.S. Senator Reid, Son Combine for China firm's Desert Plant."   Reuters.  31 August 2012.     Woods, Lucy.  "Moapa Tribe and First Solar Begin Construction of 250MW Project."   PV-Tech  24 March 2014.
You Bet Your Life was the post-World War II vehicle that provided Groucho Marx with a career apart from his brothers and introduced him to a generation of viewers too young to remember him from his stage or film work. The interview-quiz show, featuring the famous $100 bonus paid to any contestant who said the "secret word" (displayed on a cartoonish stuffed duck that dropped from above if a contestant uttered the word of the day) debuted on radio in 1947, aired on both radio and television through 1960, and continued on television only for its final season in 1960-61  all in all, an amazing fourteen-year run for a quiz show with a tiny budget, a plain set, and a small jackpot (even by 1950s standards).   Although You Bet Your Life was structured to make it appear as though every show was completely ad-libbed by Groucho (who issued a steady stream of impromptu questions, off-the-cuff remarks, and cutting put-downs to contestants he had met only moments earlier), a good deal of preparation went into each episode. Potential contestants were selected and interviewed in advance, scripts for each week's show were prepared by writers and reviewed by Groucho, and the comedian used a mechanical teleprompter to read his lines during the recording of the program. (In early telecasts of You Bet Your Life, Groucho can be seen reading off sheets of paper propped up in front of him on something resembling a music stand.) It was true, however, that Groucho didn't actually meet the contestants until they walked onstage, and he certainly had plenty of latitude to depart from the prepared gags and questions (as did the contestants), with the result that much of the show's banter was indeed improvised on the spot. About a hour's worth of material was recorded for each half hour program so that flubs, uninteresting segments, and any troublesome or offensive remarks by Groucho could be edited out. The most notable remark of Groucho's You Bet Your Life years, that one that has gone down in legend as one of pop culture's most notorious comeback quips, supposedly occurred when Grouch was interviewing a Mrs. Story, a contestant with a remarkably large number of children (a number that varies anywhere from 10 to 21 in different tellings of the legend): GROUCHO: "Why do you have so many children? That's a big responsibility and a big burden." MRS. STORY: "Well, because I love my children and I think that's our purpose here on Earth, and I love my husband." GROUCHO: "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." But did Groucho really say this, or is it a remark that (like so many other infamous quips) originated elsewhere and was later attributed to the notable figure deemed most likely to have said it?   Since You Bet Your Life was taped in advance, heavily edited, and not aired live, this remark (if it truly occurred) would certainly have been cut from the finished program as too offensive for the standards of the times; so we can state definitively that (claims to the contrary notwithstanding) nobody ever actually heard it broadcast. If Groucho had really made this quip, the only people who would have heard it would have been the people present during the recording of the program (i.e., the cast, crew, contestants, and studio audience). So, did Groucho in fact utter this risqu remark, even if his bon mot never made it onto the airwaves? The one person who would undoubtedly know the truth is Groucho himself, and he maintained in a 1972 interview with Roger Ebert for Esquire magazine that he never said it: I got $25 from Reader's Digest last week for something I never said. I get credit all the time for things I never said. You know that line in You Bet Your Life? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say: "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally"? I never said that. This debate really should end here, based on a complete lack of evidence that Groucho ever said any such thing, coupled with his unequivocal statement affirming that he did not (and Groucho had no motive to disclaim one of the most famous lines associated with his celebrity if he really had said it). Instead, the legend persists in large part because misinformation about it is propagated over and over. Take, for example, the following account, presented as a first-person telling in a 1976 book often touted as a Groucho Marx autobiography, The Secret Word Is Groucho: Wherever I go, people ask me about a remark I purportedly made to Mrs. Story. Folklore about the encounter has been so broadly disseminated that it has been variously described as occurring with a mother having any number from ten to thirty children. The story, however, is not apocryphal. It did happen. "Why do you have so many children?" I asked Mrs. Story. "That's a big responsibility and a big burden." "Well," she replied, "because I love children, and I think that's our purpose here on earth, and I love my husband." "I love my cigar too," I shot back, "but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." That kind of remark can have one of two reactions. It will either cause a sharp intake of breath at having crossed some forbidden frontier or it will bring the house down. The studio audience loved it, but the people out there in Radioland never got a chance to react. The exchange was clipped out by Dwan, the house censor. But even though Groucho is credited as the primary author of The Secret Word Is Groucho, it isn't really an "autobiography." The book was actually put together in the waning years of the comedian's life by freelance writer Hector Arce, who ostensibly obtained input from Groucho; and it's unlikely that Groucho's declining health and memory allowed him to contribute much (if anything) to the finished work, leaving Arce to rely on secondary sources. Arce consulted various personnel associated with You Bet Your Life in producing the book; almost certainly one (or more) of those people proffered the "cigar" story as true to Arce, who rewrote it in Groucho's voice and inserted it into the book, unaware that his subject had denied it just a few years previously. Arce's account doesn't sound like Groucho's speaking or writing style at all, and it presents a Groucho who has suddenly "remembered" details he was previously unfamiliar with in his Esquire few years earlier (i.e., he's corrected the gender of the person he was addressing from male to female, he now recalls the contestant's name, and he's fixed the wording of the remark from "I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally" to the pithier "I love my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while"). While the 1972 Esquire interview in which Groucho discussed this quip unideniably contained Groucho's own words, the same can't be said for what was presented in Arce's book.  The Secret Word Is Groucho account quoted above also has Groucho asserting that the purported exchange with Mrs. Story was "clipped out by Dwan, the house censor." Groucho of course would have known that Robert Dwan was not a "house censor"; he was one of the producers who worked on You Bet Your Life for its entire run, staging the weekly performances and supervising the editing of each episode for broadcast. In his own book about the program (As Long As They're Laughing: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life), Dwan wrote: Last summer in Maine, a respectable New York dealer in rare books sidled up to me and said, conspiratorially, "Is it true Groucho made that crack about his cigar?" I knew immediately what he meant. For a long time, I, too, believed it was a figment of the mass libido. But, after discussions with my late partner, Bernie Smith, I am convinced that it did happen. I now believe that Groucho said it, but that he didn't mean what the dirty joke collectors think he meant. That remark, taken at its burlesque show level, was simply not his style. But outside of that studio audience and the 200 people who laughed that night, no one else ever heard that joke, because the exchange was never broadcast. It was never heard beyond the confines of NBC Studio C in Hollywood, and yet the story has spread to become an underground legend. This account is even more curious: Robert Dwan, the man who was onstage for every performance of You Bet Your Life and who supervised the editing of the show, didn't remember hearing Groucho make such a remark, yet he came to "believe" the legend was real because someone else told him so many years after the fact. And although Dwan noted that he consulted "20 volumes of the original scripts" and a "collection of acetate recordings of the unedited performances and tapes of the edited broadcasts" and four reels of 16mm film consisting of "the funniest and most audacious of the sequences which we were required to delete from the broadcasts as being unsuitable for viewing in the 1950s" in the preparation of his book, he made nary a mention of turning up anything supporting the "cigar" story. Steve Stoliar, who worked as a secretary in Groucho's household during the last few years of the comedian's life, also made an affirmative case for this legend in his 1996 book, Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House: You may have heard about a legendary line concerning a certain cigar that Groucho was alleged to have uttered during one program. Some say it never happened; others swear they've seen it on TV. As it turns out, the truth is somewhere inbetween. One of the unexpected pleasures of spending time with the people behind the scenes was getting to the bottom of this infamous incident. For the record, it was [You Bet Your Life head writer] Bernie Smith who provided us with the details. To our amazement, Bernie had kept a chart throughout the life of the show, in which he had meticulously recorded the names of the contestants, what the secret word was and how much they ended up winning. There was, it seems, a sign painter named Mr. Story who lived in Bakersfield, California. He and his wife had what was reputed to be the largest family in America. Originally there were twenty-two children, but three had died. During the first season of "You Bet Your Life," when it was broadcast on radio only, the Story family was bused in from Bakersfield to be contestants on the show. After a bit of small talk, the conversation went like this: Groucho: "How many children do you have?" Mrs. Story: "Nineteen, Groucho." Groucho: "Nineteen?! Why do you have so many children? It must be a terrible responsibility and a burden." Mrs. Story: "Well, because I love my children  and I think that's our purpose here on Earth  and I love my husband." Groucho: "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while!" The studio audience went wild, but director Bob Dwan ordered the exchange deleted before it could be aired because it was obviously too racy for 1947 sensibilities. So the Story story is true, but anyone who claims to have seen that program is either mistaken or lying because it occurred three years before the show's 1950 television debut and it was edited out of the radio show before anyone but the studio audience had a chance to hear it. Unfortunately, no copies of that legendary outtake are known to have survived. Although the imagined dialogue between Groucho and the female contestant is lifted directly from The Secret Word Is Groucho, this account does at least introduce some detail to the story (e.g., a specific number of children, the hometown of the contestants, the father's occupation, the year of the interview) indicating actual research rather than mere repetition of legend. As we'll see shortly, however, some of this detail is inaccurate. The most recent presentation of the "cigar" legend we're aware of is the background booklet enclosed with the 2003 DVD release You Bet Your Life: The Lost Episodes (a collection of some of the show's preserved TV episodes), which contained the following information about an audio bonus feature included on one of the discs: In December 1950 DeSoto distributed a twelve inch 78rpm recording featuring highlights from You Bet Your Life and a holiday message from Groucho to their dealers. The nine minute recording includes an excerpt from Groucho's November 17, 1947 radio interview with Mr. and Mrs. Story of Bakersfield, California, the parents of twenty children. This interview has become legendary for a portion of it that never aired. Groucho: "Why do you have so many children? It must be a terrible responsibility and a burden." Mrs. Story: "Well, because I love my children and I think that's our purpose here on Earth, and I love my husband." Groucho: "I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." Considering how many people have claimed to have seen or heard that exchange over the years it would seem likely that it must exist somewhere. But of the ninety-nine radio episodes of You Bet Your Life that aired prior to the show's television debut, fewer than half of them survive. And the show with Mr. and Mrs. Story is not among them. The famous exchange would certainly have been edited out anyway. The brief clip from Season's Greetings from DeSoto  Laughs with Groucho is all that remains of this episode. And the only people who witnessed that legendary moment were in the studio audience that fateful night in 1947. (Note that the imagined dialogue between Groucho and Mrs. Story is lifted directly from the book The Secret Word Is Groucho, another indication that it came from someone associated with the You Bet Your Life program and not Groucho himself.) It is true that Marion and Charlotte Story of Bakersfield, California, the parents of twenty children, were once featured as contestants on You Bet Your Life. According to announcer George Fenneman's introduction, Mr. and Mrs. Story were selected to participate because the producers thought it would be interesting to go through the audience and find the couple with the largest number of offspring for Groucho to interview, and as the parents of twenty children (not nineteen, as stated in Raised Eyebrows), Mr. and Mrs. Story qualified for that honor. (Since You Bet Your Life was a well-planned show that interviewed and prepped its contestants in advance, Mr. and Mrs. Story likely appeared on the program by invitation and were not merely present in the audience by happenstance, with George Fenneman's introduction of them probably stretching the truth a little to create an exaggerated sense of spontaneity for the listening audience.) It is also true that this interview took place during You Bet Your Life's days as a radio-only program (it didn't begin airing on television in addition to radio until October 1950); so even if the "cigar" quip had sprung from this encounter, anyone who now claims to have seen Groucho make the remark on television is clearly mistaken.   As usual, however, the DVD booklet's account is rife with misinformation. A complete audio recording of (the broadcast portions of) Marion and Charlotte Story's appearance on You Bet Your Life does indeed exist (and is linked below). Moreover, that recording couldn't possibly date from 17 November 1947, as claimed, because Groucho can be heard making promotional references to DeSoto-Plymouth, who did not become sponsors of You Bet Your Life until partway through the 1949-50 season. (External evidence indicates this recording actually dates from the broadcast of 11 January 1950, the first show aired after DeSoto-Plymouth took over sponsorship of You Bet Your Life from Elgin-American.)  What do we find in this recording? It does not include anything like the infamous "cigar" quip, Groucho's only mention of stogies coming when he inquires of Mr. Story, "With each new kid, do you go around passing out cigars?" ("I stopped at about a dozen," Mr. Story responds.) And for those who would claim that the "cigar" remark was indeed uttered by Groucho but excised from the aired version of the show, we note that none of the claimed dialogue ancillary to that remark is present in the recording, either: Groucho does not ask Charlotte Story why she has so many children, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Story professes to thinking that having children is "our purpose here on Earth," nor does Mrs. Story proclaim that she loves her husband. As we touched on earlier in this article, it's a common phenomenon of urban legendry that amusing stories involving clever repartee often retroactively place words into the mouths of the famous people deemed most likely to have said them. Sometimes, however, the designated mouths don't really match up with the words assigned to them. Johnny Carson's image has long been saddled with the claim that he made a risqu remark to a cat-carrying starlet on the Tonight Show, even though he was never known for employing that sort of crude sexual humor in his TV talk show host role. Likewise, although it might seem that no one would fit a sexual double entendre involving a cigar better than Groucho Marx, even You Bet Your Life producer Robert Dwan acknowledged (as quoted above) that it was too burlesque and not really Groucho's style. It was the kind of dirty put-down Groucho might blurt out in private, but not to a kindly couple on a national radio program. Groucho's style on You Bet Your Life was typically much gentler, as exemplified by the following exchange made under similar circumstances (i.e., when he questioned a female contestant who came from a family of seventeen children): remark Groucho: How does your father feel about this rather startling turn of events? Is he happy or just dazed? Daughter: Oh, my daddy loves children. Groucho: Well, I like pancakes, but I haven't got closetsful of them ... It's not inconceivable that the infamous "cigar" quip might have originated with this very exchange, when someone later misremembered or deliberately "naughtied up" the dialogue to better fit Groucho's public image and changed "pancakes" to "cigar." NOTE: Various "blooper" records purport to offer an "actual recording" of Groucho's remark. However, those record makers typically employed recordings they made themselves using sound-alikes in order to "re-create" events for which no actual recording existed (in most cases because the events were apocryphal ones that never took place). blooper  Brooks, Tim and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows.
New York: Ballatine Books, 1999. ISBN 0-345-42923-0 (p. 1138-1139). Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio.
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-507678-8 (pp. 732-734). Dwan, Robert. As Long As They're Laughing: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life.
Baltimore: Midnight Marquee, 2000. ISBN 01-887664-36-X (p. 129). Ebert, Roger. "A Living Legend, Rated R." 
Esquire. July 1972 (p. 143). Kaltenbach, Chris. "Also 20 Years Dead: Groucho."
The Baltimore Sun. 19 August 1997 (p. E1). Kanfer, Stefan. Groucho.
New York: Vintage Books, 2000. ISBN 0-375-70207-5. Marx, Groucho and Hector Arce. The Secret Word Is Groucho.
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976. ISBN 0-399-11690-7 (pp. 43-44). Stoliar, Steve. Raised Eyebrows: My Years Inside Groucho's House.
Los Angeles: General Publishing, 1996. ISBN 1-881649-73-3 (pp. 124-125). Since October 2006 this story has come to us under a variety of titles, including "Going Postal," "Angels at the Post Office," "Angels Turn Up In Unexpected Places," and "This is a US Postal Service Story." Example: Some of you may know that our 14 year old dog, Abbey, died last month (8/23). The day after she died, my 4 year old daughter Meredith was crying and talking about how much she missed Abbey. She asked if we could write a letter to God so that when Abbey got to heaven, God would recognize her. She dictated and I wrote: Dear God,Will you please take special care of our dog, Abbey? She died yesterday and is heaven. We miss her very much. We are happy that you let us have her as our dog even though she got sick. I hope that you will play with her. She likes to play with balls and swim before she got sick. I am sending some pictures of her so that when you see her in heaven you will know she is our special dog. But I really do miss her. Love,Meredith Claire P.S.: Mommy wrote the words after Mer told them to her We put that in an envelope with 2 pictures of Abbey, and addressed it to God/Heaven. We put our return address on it. Then Mer stuck some stamps on the front (because, as she said, it may take lots of stamps to get a letter all the way to heaven) and that afternoon I let her drop it into the letter box at the post office. For a few days, she would ask if God had gotten the letter yet. I told her that I thought He had. Yesterday, for Labor Day, we took the kids to Austin to a natural history museum. When we got back, there was a package wrapped in gold paper on our front porch. Curious, I went to look at it. It had a gold star card on the front and said "To: Mer" in an unfamiliar hand. Meredith took it in and opened it. Inside was a book by Mr. Rogers, When a Pet Dies. Taped to the inside front cover was the letter we had written to God, in its opened envelope (which was marked 'Return to Sender: Insufficient address'). On the opposite page, one of the pictures of Abbey was taped under the words "For Meredith." We turned to the back cover, and there was the other picture of Abbey, and this handwritten note on pink paper: Dear Mer,I know that you will be happy to know that Abbey arrived safely and soundly in Heaven! Having the pictures you sent to me was such a big help. I recognized Abbey right away. You know, Meredith, she isn't sick anymore. Her spirit is here with me  just like she stays in your heart  young and running and playing. Abbey loved being your dog, you know. Since we don't need our bodies in heaven, I don't have any pockets!  so I can't keep your beautiful letter. I am sending it to you with the pictures so that you will have this book to keep and remember Abbey. One of my angels is taking care of this for me. I hope the little book helps. Thank you for the beautiful letter. Thank your mother for sending it. What a wonderful mother you have! I picked her especially for you. I send my blessings every day and remember that I love you very much. By the way, I am in heaven and wherever there is love. Love,God, and the special angel who wrote this after God told her the words. As a parent and a pet lover, this is one of the kindest things that I've ever experienced. I have no way to know who sent it, but there is some very kind soul working in the dead letter office. Just wanted to share this act of compassion :) dear friend  hope you enjoy it as much as I did According to Cary Clack of the San Antonio Express-News, the tale is real. In mid-August 2006, the San Antonio family of Greg and Joy Scrivener and their three children suffered the loss of Abbey, their 14-year-old black and white dog. Driven by concern for their pet's future welfare, 4-year-old Meredith, the Scriveners' middle child, dictated the note quoted above to her mother, then enclosed it and two photos of the family dog in an envelope addressed "To: God in Heaven." This envelope, bearing the family's return address, was dropped into a mailbox at the Brook Hollow post office. Two weeks later, the Scriveners found on their front porch a package wrapped in gold-colored paper and addressed "To: Mer." In the parcel, along with the letter from "God" quoted above, was a book by Fred Rogers (of TV's Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood fame), When a Pet Dies (a book that "helps children share feelings of the loss of a pet while offering reassurance that grieving is a natural, healing thing to do"). When a Pet Dies According to her mother, Meredith was comforted by the book and letter and was unastounded that God saw fit to write back. "She wasn't surprised because she had such faith that her letter was going to get to God." (The oldest of the Scrivener children, 6-year-old Andy, was impressed, though: He "thought it was pretty special his sister got a book from the angel," says his mum.) While Mrs. Scrivener considered asking at the post office about the package, she decided against it. "I kind of like not knowing," she said. "I don't know who took the time to do it, but it was an angel. We all think about doing these things, but no one takes the time to do it." However, even true tales become subject to embellishment when circulated on the Internet. Often accompanying the online version is a photograph of a little blonde girl hugging a black Labrador retriever, yet it is not a photo of the actual child and dog from the story. Instead, some unknown person in search of a "little girl and her dog" picture copied it from a web site belonging to an unrelated family. The child in the misattributed photo's actual name is Isabelle and the dog's name is Sara: photograph  Clack, Cary.  "Angel Mails Solace, Affirms a Girl's Faith."
  San Antonio Express-News.  22 October 2006  (Life; p. 1). One of the more unusual and complicated theories associated with the sovereign citizen and tax protester movements is the belief that lawyers who are members of bar associations in the United States are, in fact, agents of the British crown and do not have legitimate status in American courts. This theory is partly informed by a false but widely repeated claim that the word "bar" in this context is an acronym for "British Accreditation Register":  Here's how the elaborate and confusing theory is outlined in an anonymously-authored essay called "Hiding Behind the Bar," which has been republished and shared in tax protester and sovereign citizen circles for more than a decade: essay During the middle 1600's, the Crown of England established a formal registry in London where barristers [lawyers] were ordered by the Crown to be accredited. The establishment of this first International Bar Association allowed barrister-lawyers from all nations to be formally recognized and accredited by the only recognized accreditation society. From this, the acronym BAR was established denoting (informally) the British Accredited Registry, whose members became a powerful and integral force within the International Bar Association (IBA). Although this has been denied repeatedly as to its existence, the acronym BAR stood for the British barrister-lawyers who were members of the larger IBA. Almost every part of this is factually inaccurate. For one thing, the International Bar Association was founded in 1947, not in the 1600s. Second, we could find no evidence of the existence of a professional association for lawyers called the "British Accredited Registry," either in 2018 or at any previous time in history. 1947 A History of the American Bar, a 1911 book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning legal scholar Charles Warren, contains no mention of any "British Accredited Registry" or "British Accreditation Registry" (with "accredited" and "accreditation" being used variously in different versions of this conspiracy theory). It would also make little sense for a group of lawyers in 17th century England to form a group describing itself as "British." Great Britain (composed of England, Wales and Scotland) does not have, and has never had, a unified courts system, instead being separated into two systems: England and Wales and Scotland. In fact, Great Britain itself was not even formally created until 1707, when the Acts of Union joined the Kingdom of Scotland with the Kingdom of England (which included Wales). book accreditation England and Wales Acts of Union But more broadly, this theory offers a confused summary of the history of "the bar." In the Middle Ages, lawyers in London established four "Inns of Court": Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, and Gray's Inn. These were physical buildings but, more figuratively, they were also the professional associations for lawyers working in the more important English courts. A "barrister" was a legal expert or advocate who has been "called to the bar." This is a metonymic phrase which is rooted in the physical barrier that was present in a courtroom, to separate fully qualified lawyers entitled to plead cases before a judge from (roughly speaking) trainee lawyers and members of the public. In modern times, this physical barrier generally separates participants in a trial (such as lawyers, clerks, defendants, the jury, and the judge) from the gallery in which members of the public and the news media sit. established metonymic So someone who has been "called to the bar" has been given the right to advocate before a judge and is thereby known as a "barrister." A "bar association" is, roughly speaking, a professional association for lawyers, akin to a guild. In some jurisdictions, bar associations are limited to barristers (as opposed to solicitors, a different type of lawyer); whereas in others, they are open to all members of the legal profession. In some jurisdictions a bar association is the body that licenses and regulates legal professionals, and in others it is merely a professional association. The "BAR" conspiracy theory essay goes on to say: When America was still a chartered group of British colonies under patent  established in what was formally named the British Crown territory of New England  the first British Accredited Registry (BAR) was established in Boston during 1761 to attempt to allow only accredited barrister-lawyers access to the British courts of New England. This was the first attempt to control who could represent defendants in the court at or within the bar in America. Today, each corporate STATE in America has it's [sic] own BAR Association, i.e. The Florida Bar or the California Bar, that licenses government officer attorneys, NOT lawyers. In reality, the U.S. courts only allow their officer attorneys to freely enter within the bar while prohibiting those learned of the law  lawyers  to do so. They prevent advocates, lawyers, counselors, barristers and solicitors from entering through the outer bar. Only licensed BAR Attorneys are permitted to freely enter within the bar separating the people from the bench because all BAR Attorneys are officers of the court itself. Does that tell you anything? A 1930 essay published in the Cornell Law Review (page 393) refers to a bar association's having been established in Boston in 1761, but remember that a bar association is no more than a kind of guild for lawyers. "Bar" is not an acronym for "British Accredited Registry," because that acronym is a fabrication. As with many sovereign citizen theories, the essay builds on the shaky foundations of an inaccurate account of the history of bar associations in the United States and draws confused conclusions about the function and legal status of lawyers. page 393 Many of these claims are based on the etymology of certain words, rather than their modern meaning. For example, the author of the essay referenced above presents the origins of the word "attorney," citing Webster's 1828 dictionary definition, as: "In the feudal law, to turn, or transfer homage and service from one lord to another." That essay also proclaims: Here's where the whole word game gets really tricky. In each State, every licensed BAR Attorney calls himself an Attorney at Law. Look at the definitions above and see for yourself that an Attorney at Law is nothing more than an attorney  one who transfers allegiance and property to the ruling land owner. That passage is false. Whatever the older origins of the word "attorney" might be, the modern definition of that word is much broader. Merriam-Webster defines an attorney as simply "one who is legally appointed to transact business on another's behalf." In common American parlance, "attorney" is used interchangeably with "lawyer." defines This fixation on word origins leads to something like a game of Telephone in the logic of the conspiracy theory, with false conclusions being drawn from inaccurate or incomplete premises. Here are more examples, summarized from the essay: The historical origins of the word "esquire" did have to do with the transfer of property between feudal land-owners, but that was hundreds of years ago. This argument is roughly analogous to claiming that because the title "Ph.D" derives from the Latin "philosophiae doctor" ("doctor of philosophy"), microbiologists with Ph.D at the end of their names have no legal right to conduct scientific research because they are actually philosophers and not scientists. "A BAR [British Accredited Registry] licensed Attorney is not an advocate," the theory goes on to falsely claim, "so how can he do anything other than what his real purpose is?": He can't plead on your behalf because that would be a conflict of interest. He can't represent the crown (ruling government) as an official officer at the same time he is allegedly representing a defendant. His sworn duty as a BAR Attorney is to transfer your ownership, rights, titles, and allegiance to the land owner. When you hire a BAR Attorney to represent you in their courts, you have hired an officer of that court whose sole purpose and occupation is to transfer what you have to the creator and authority of that court.  It's not clear what the origins of the the fabricated acronym are, but "British Accredited Registry" was invoked as early as 2001 by Austin Gary Cooper, a long-time "sovereign citizen" activist. In 2003, a U.S. District Court in Colorado barred Cooper and his wife Martha Cooper from selling advice on how to avoid paying federal income tax after the couple set up groups called "Taking Back America" and the "Ten Foundation," which advised their paying customers that they could renounce their United States citizenship, call themselves "American citizens" instead, and escape their tax obligations. In 2006, Cooper was given a six-month prison sentence for criminal contempt after failing to comply with that court order, which obliged him to hand over the names of his customers, among other requirements. During court proceedings, Cooper accused the judge of treason and called him a "Nazi bastard" and a "British Accredited Registry" lawyer, saying: "You people are going to destroy our country. British accredited registry bar association, you're going to destroy our country ..." 2001 barred sentence proceedings In 2017, prosecutors in Tennessee charged Cooper, who is now 69 years old, with 10 counts of forgery and filing a fraudulent lien. The case was ongoing as of January 2018. charged ongoing Warren, Charles.  "A History of the American Bar."
   Little, Brown and Company, 1911. U.K. Parliament.  "Act of Union 1707."
  U.K. Parliament.  Unknown publication date. Wickser, Philip J.  "Bar Associations."
  Cornell Law Review  (Vol. 15.3, April 1930). Babcock, Chief Judge Lewis T.  "Permanent Injunction Order, U.S.A v. Austin Gary Cooper et al."
  U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.  20 November 2003. Morlin, Bill.  "Ten Sovereign Citizens Face 320 Felonies in Tennessee."
  Southern Poverty Law Center.  28 March 2017. On 22 June 2017, the Occupy Democrats Facebook page posted a meme claiming that the United States government paid for Mitch McConnell's care and rehabilitation when the Republican senior senator contracted polio as an infant in the 1940s. meme This claim is contrasted, in the meme, with McConnell's support for the Senate Republican health care plan published that day: plan As a kid, Mitch McConnell had polio, and the government paid for ALL of his care and rehabilitation. Now, as the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, McConnell is taking government-funded care away from tens of millions of Americans. Let that sink in.   An article accompanying this meme reports that government-sponsored, publicly funded healthcare saved the young McConnell's life: article Mitch McConnell has been relentlessly working to roll back Medicaid and deprive millions of Americans of government-sponsored healthcare coverage for eight years now. But if it werent for the government, McConnell wouldnt be able to walk at all.  Young Mitch came down with a terrible case of polio as a child in Alabama. My mother was, of course, like many mothers of young polio victims, perplexed about what to do, anxious about whether I would be disabled for the rest of my life he admitted in a 2005 interview. But luckily for him, his mother took him 50 miles to the Warm Springs, where President Roosevelt won his own battle with polio and established a polio treatment center that was paid for by the public. President Roosevelt asked the people of America to send in dimes to the White House as part of his March of the Dimes foundation. Over two and a half million dimes were mailed in, and they paid for Mitchs physical therapy and treatment. A Death and Taxes article posted on the same date reports a similar story:  article How did Warm springs fund McConnells therapy, you ask? This was two decades before Lyndon Johnson launched federal health coverage by signing into law the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. In the mid-30s, Roosevelt and his law partner Basil OConnor founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation and started organizing fundraising balls around the country. By 1938, however, the balls grew less effective and the president needed a new strategy. Using a phrase coined by vaudeville entertainer Eddie Cantor, March of Dimes  a spin on the popular newsreel series March of Time  Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes foundation and launched a campaign asking the public to mail ten-cent donations to the White House. Within a month, Roosevelt received around 2,680,000 dimes. The campaign continued through WWII. McConnell started visiting Warm Springs in 1944. In other words, he overcame polio with the help of public money allocated by the White House. Mitch McConnell has often told the story of his childhood affliction with polio, and the role of FDR's Warm Springs rehabilitation center in his recovery. In his 2016 memoir The Long Game, McConnell recounted how he was struck with polio at the age of two while staying with his mother in his aunt's home in Five Points, Alabama.  memoir It's one of my life's great fortunes that Sister's home was only about sixty miles from Warm Springs, Georgia, where President Franklin D. Roosevelt had established a polio treatment center and where he'd often travel to find relief from the polio that paralyzed him at the age of thirty-nine. My mother took me there every chance she had. The nurses would teach her how to perform exercises meant to rehabilitate my leg while also emphasizing her need to make me believe I could walk, even though I wasn't allowed to. So it's clear that Mitch McConnell did indeed receive significant help  primarily in the form of physical therapy and physical therapy training for his mother  from the polio rehabilitation center established by Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia.  However, neither this particular center nor the care given to McConnell were government-funded. Roosevelt purchased the property at Warm Springs, Georgia and established a center there in 1927, having visited frequently for therapy for his own polio, which he contracted in 1921. He (and others) set up the Warm Springs Foundation, a nonprofit organization that depended on wealthy philanthropists and donations from members of the public.  1927 In 1934, Basil O'Connor (once a partner at Roosevelt's law firm and a close associate of the recently-elected President) began organizing fundraising for the Warm Springs Foundation, set around the President's birthday celebrations each year. Within four years, these birthday balls had raised $1,350,030 for the Warm Springs rehabilitation center (the equivalent of $23.3 million in 2017). equivalent In September 1937, Roosevelt reconstituted the Warm Springs Foundation as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (as polio was then widely known); in January 1938, the directors of the foundation launched the first "March of Dimes", a phrase coined by vaudeville star Eddie Cantor who helped promote a nationwide fundraising drive which attracted the support of Hollywood stars as well as charitable middle-class families giving 10 cents each.  In six months, the March of Dimes raised $81,073 (which would be about $1.4 million in 2017). In July 1938, the New York Times published a detailed auditor's report, which offered a breakdown of donations and expenditure. report Some aspects of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis perhaps reflect a more innocent time. For example, the hundreds of thousands of dimes sent by members of the public were processed at the White House and a cheque was given to Roosevelt, who then turned it over to O'Connor for distribution via the Foundation. However, in many ways the operation was a precursor of the professional, almost corporate style of non-profit fundraising and campaigning that has followed since. For example, a large portion of funds raised in 1938 came from attendees at 8,000 Presidential birthday balls throughout the country, labor organizations contributed the equivalent of $760,000, and the Western Union and Postal Telegraph companies wrote off the cost of thousands of birthday greetings sent to the President at 25 cents per message. The following year, charity sporting events were held throughout the country, and badges were distributed to donors as part of an awareness-raising "Give a Dime and Wear a Button" campaign.  year Funds raised for the Warm Springs Foundation and National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis were also distributed in the form of research grants to scientists hoping for a breakthrough in the treatment of polio. grants This came to fruition in the 1950s when Dr. Jonas Salk  who had received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis  developed a successful polio vaccine.  Jonas Salk The Warm Springs center that helped in Mitch McConnell's recovery was indeed founded by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was President at the time McConnell was struck by the disease, in 1944. Roosevelt was the driving force behind both the Warm Springs Foundation and its successor, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, and used his political office to energetically promote fundraising for polio care and research. The funding came from the kindness and charity of the public, as well as wealthy celebrities and large corporations. However, it was operated as an innovative, nationwide nonprofit organization, not a federal or state agency, and it was not taxpayer or government-funded. The Warm Springs center visited by McConnell remained owned and operated by a nonprofit organization until 1974, when the state of Georgia took it over, making it truly government-run. Since 2014, it has been owned and operated by Augusta University.  Augusta University McConnell, Mitch. "The Long Game." (pg 9,10).
 Penguin Random House. 31 May 2016. New York Times. "$1,350,030 Raised for Warm Springs."
 New York Times Archive. 16 January 1938. New York Times. "Net of $1,021,034 to Paralysis Fund."
 New York Times Archive. 7 July 1938. New York Times. "Sport World Aids in Paralysis Drive."
 New York Times Archive. 27 December 1938. One of President Barack Obamas signature issues at the moment is a push to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour. Its such a popular policy, he said in aspeechon March 5, 2014, that even Republicans have little quarrel with it. When I talk about (raising the) minimum wage, Obama said, not only is it good policy, but the majority of the country, including half of Republicans, agree with it. We wondered whether polling data backed up this claim. So we looked at independent polls taken recently that asked about the minimum wage. A review of the polling data suggests a more nuanced situation than Obamas claim suggests. Our first look at the data showed that a minimum-wage hike is popular among Americans broadly. For instance, when theCBS News-New York Timespollasked, Do you favor or oppose raising the minimum wage to $10.10? in February 2014, the poll found 65 percent support. And that was actually down a bit from the 72 percent support registered in the January edition of the poll. Similarly, aPew Research Center/USA Todaypoll from January asked whether respondents supported an increase in the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour and found 73 percent support. But what about Republicans specifically? More than half of Republicans favor a minimum-wage increase, polls found, but in most of these polls, less than half of Republicans supported raising the wage to $10.10, the amount Obama is seeking. One poll that did not specify a target amount for the minimum-wage hike was conducted byQuinnipiac University. It asked, Would you support or oppose raising the national minimum wage, which is now $7.25 an hour? Among Republicans, 52 percent expressed support, while 45 percent said they opposed it. That provides some support to Obamas claim. But once respondents were asked by other pollsters about the $10.10 figure -- a roughly 40 percent increase from todays federal minimum wage -- Republican support sagged. The clearest example is aCBS-New York Timespollfrom February that asked, As you may know, the federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour. Do you favor or oppose raising the minimum wage to $10.10? Republicans expressed 42 percent support, 54 percent opposition. Another clear example was anABC News-Washington Postpollfrom December, 2013 that asked, The minimum wage in this country is now $7.25 an hour. What do you think it should be? Among Republicans, only 21 percent favored keeping it the same or lowering it, but even fewer respondents -- 7 percent -- favored a minimum wage in excess of $10. Two other polls showed Republican support close to 50 percent, but falling just short. However, the differences were within the margin of sampling error -- it's possible that more than half of Republicans were in support of a $10.10 wage, though also possible that the actual support level was even lower than the official result. ACBS-New York Timespollfrom January that asked the same question as the February poll found that Republicans expressed 48 percent support, 51 percent opposition to a $10.10 wage. And anNBC News-Wall Street Journalpollfrom December 2013asked, I'm going to mention a number of different amounts and for each one, please tell me if you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose raising the hourly minimum wage to that amount. When presented with the $10.10 rate, 47 percent of Republicans expressed support. One poll clearly supported Obamas position. The JanuaryPew Research Center/USA Todaypoll found 53 percent of Republicans backing a $10.10 minimum wage, with 43 percent opposed. The significance of the $10.10 figure is not academic. According to a March 6accountin theWashington Post, early last year, White House strategists rejected (the $10.10 figure), worried that it could destroy jobs and anger the business community just as the regulation-heavy Affordable Care Act was about to take effect. Instead, former officials say, the White House settled on a more cautious path,unveiling a $9-an-hour minimum wageproposal  a target even lower than Obamahad proposedduring the 2008 campaign. However, thePostreported, the lower amount disappointed advocates for the working poor, as well as congressional Democrats, who were already pushing to set the $7.25 wage closer to $10 an hour. Over the past year, Obama reconsidered, casting off initial concerns in favor of unifying his party ahead of this falls midterm elections. In other words, White House officials had long realized there was a difference in the degree of public support for a $10.10 minimum wage and a smaller hike, so it would be misleading for Obama to now imply that majority Republican support for an unspecified minimum-wage hike means that Republicans automatically support the presidents proposal to raise the wage to $10.10. Our ruling Obama said, When I talk about (raising the) minimum wage ... half of Republicans agree with it. Republicans do support a minimum-wage hike if you don't specify a dollar figure. But once you mention the $10.10 target Obama wants, his case gets shakier. We rate the claim Mostly True. In late September 2021, Snopes readers asked us to examine the facts surrounding a widely-shared but suspicious-looking Facebook promotion that promised users free Texas Roadhouse vouchers in return for them sharing and commenting on the post.  One version of the scam consisted of several photos of what appeared to be Texas Roadhouse steak dishes, as well as a picture of staff attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new restaurant, along with the following text: Im Gerald L.Morgan, CEO of texas roadhouses. I know times have been tough so to help everyone out I have a special surprise for everyone who shares&comments then. Every person who does this by Sep 29th can get a voucher. Each voucher can be used at any texas roadhouses restaurant to get a meal for two with drinks!   A second version of the scam invited users to like, share or comment on the post, before clicking on a link and "entering" or "registering" [safe link] for the voucher: registering   Users who clicked on one of those links were directed to various dubious websites (we have archived or made screenshots of these links, so they are safe to click on) where they were instructed to "claim" their prize or "register." Clicking on those links, in turn, brought users to a variety of entirely unrelated websites offering various dubious promotions and gift card offers of their own.  various dubious websites dubious promotions Snopes discovered that at least 13 separate Facebook profiles ran various versions of the Texas Roadhouse scam, in the final days of September 2021, with all of them using the blatantly inauthentic profile name "Texas Roadhouse's." The actual Texas Roadhouse chain addressed the scam in a Sept. 28 Facebook post, writing: Sept. 28 Facebook post There is a scam circulating on Facebook offering Texas Roadhouse meal vouchers and other benefits to our guests who share their posts. This account is attempting to gain access to personal information... If you see a suspicious post in your News Feed offering free vouchers to Texas Roadhouse, please do not click on any links or share with your friends. On Oct. 7, 2022, a Twitter user named Nathalie Jacoby tweeted, "Will you join me in boycotting Home Depot for donating $1.75 MILLION to Herschel Walkers campaign?" Walker is a Republican U.S. Senate candidate for the state of Georgia. The tweet led several of our readers to email us about the matter. tweeted  In the 2022 U.S. election, Walker was challenging U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat. Should Walker win the seat, it would potentially give Republicans a coveted Senate majority. The race brought with it a lot of rumors and news stories. One of the biggest rumors appeared to be about Walker purportedly encouraging a woman to have two abortions. However, for this fact check, we will only be looking into the claim about Home Depot. Walker encouraging a woman to have two abortions Home Depot responded to Jacoby's tweet by saying that the contribution in question came from the company's co-founder Bernie Marcus. responded  We also reached out to the company to inquire about the matter. By email, a company spokesperson told us the following: "Thanks for reaching out. This isnt true. Home Depots PAC hasnt donated to Walkers or Warnocks campaigns. Our co-founder Bernie Marcus left Home Depot more than 20 years ago, and his views do not represent the company." It's true that Marcus retired from the company in 2002. However, despite what some readers may have read in other articles that appeared at the top of Google search results, that wasn't the full story. retired On the morning of Oct. 10, Judd Legum of the Popular Information blog reported that Home Depot PAC, a political action committee associated with the company, had donated funds to a Republican organization that funded ad spending for Walker's campaign. reported associated funded ad spending After reviewing Legum's reporting, we located expenditure records for Home Depot PAC that had been published on OpenSecrets.org. The website calls itself "the nation's premier research and government transparency group tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and policy." published The information on Open Secrets indicated the following: While there is no record of Home Depot directly donating to Walker's efforts to win the Senate seat, Home Depot PAC did provide funds to the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC). According to reporting from Politico that was published on Oct. 4, the NRSC was "splitting a new $8.5 million ad buy with the Walker campaign." National Republican Senatorial Committee reporting We contacted Legum by Twitter DM, who told us that the Federal Election Commission website, FEC.gov, also showed four key records related to Home Depot and NRSC. These records indicated that Home Depot PAC, shown on the website as The Home Depot Inc. Political Action Committee, had donated a combined $90,000 to the NRSC in late 2021 and early 2022. four key records  Other large expenditures made by the Home Depot PAC in 2021 and 2022 also went to organizations that were associated with the Republican Party, according to the FEC website. Examples included $45,000 to the California Republican Party and $25,000 to the Georgians First Leadership Committee. Other large expenditures At the same time, Home Depot PAC also gave money in 2021 and 2022 to organizations that appeared to be led by Democrats. Examples included $60,000 to the California Legislative Black Caucus Policy Institute, $50,000 to the Los Angeles Delegation Foundation, $30,000 to the Women in Power PAC, and $25,000 to the Asian Pacific Islander Leadership PAC. Home Depot Note: Jacoby, the Twitter user, also previously tweeted in support of boycotting CNN, Chick-fil-A, Kanye West, and Hobby Lobby and MyPillow. CNN Chick-fil-A Kanye West Hobby Lobby and MyPillow Allison, Natalie, and Marianne Levine. Republicans Rally around Walkers Imperiled Candidacy. POLITICO, 4 Oct. 2022, https://www.politico.com/. Federal Election Commission. https://www.fec.gov/. Grace Meng Elected as New Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Leadership PAC. Capacleadership.Org, 13 Apr. 2016, https://www.capacleadership.org/. Home Depot. Twitter, https://twitter.com/homedepot/. Jacoby, Nathalie. Twitter, https://twitter.com/nathaliejacoby1/. Kamisar, Ben. Big Georgia Senate Ad Spending Shift Highlights a Novel Strategy. NBC News, 23 Sept. 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/big-georgia-senate-ad-spending-shift-highlights-novel-strategy-rcna49125. Kempner, Matt. Home Depot Founders Reunite: $40M for Vets, 1st Responders Health. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 16 Feb. 2021. AJC.com, https://www.ajc.com/ajcjobs/home-depot-founders-reunite-40m-for-vets-1st-responders-health/WRWBASV6GREQTKUU56LWLXGGY4/. Koseff, Alexei. Women Target Seats Held by California Lawmakers Accused of Sexual Harassment. The Sacramento Bee, 15 Feb. 2018, https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article200150799.html. Legum, Judd. Who Is Really Financing Herschel Walkers Campaign? Popular Information, 10 Oct. 2022, https://popular.info/p/who-is-really-financing-herschel. Members. CLBCPI Foundation, https://cablackcaucus.org/members/. National Republican Senatorial Committee. https://www.nrsc.org/. NBCSL | California Legislative Black Caucus Elects New Leadership. 25 Aug. 2022, https://nbcsl.org/media-center/news/item/2376-california-legislative-black-caucus-elects-new-leadership.html. OpenSecrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/. Report: Walker Encouraged Woman to Have Second Abortion. The Associated Press, 8 Oct. 2022, https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-herschel-walker-congress-government-and-politics-9d7d9c68a802169994b9db719d8256c0. Rosenhall, Laurel. The New Thing for California Politicians? Sweet Charity. CalMatters, 18 Feb. 2020, https://calmatters.org/projects/california-lawmaker-nonprofits-politics-charity-campaign-finance-foundation-dark-money/. Scribner, Herb. Home Depot Denies Donating over $1 Million to Herschel Walkers Campaign. Axios, 8 Oct. 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/10/08/home-depot-herschel-walker-georgia-donation. Werschkul, Ben. Home Depot Now the Biggest Corporate Donor to 2020 Election Objectors, Analysis Finds. Yahoo Finance, 25 Mar. 2022, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/home-depot-biggest-corporate-contributor-to-2020-election-objectors-analysis-finds-185705617.html. After this story was published, on Oct. 10, we added an email statement sent to us by Home Depot. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, speaking in Austin, bemoaned widening income differences between the countrys very rich and the rest of us. And in his remarks at aSouth Austin union hall, the Vermont independentmulling a runfor the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination also warned about American failures to save money. Heres something not talked about, something that can make us all very, very nervous, Sanders said. Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in their savings account. And you know what that means and you know why people are so stressed out? If you have less than $10,000, he said, that means an automobile accident, a divorce, a serious illness, a crisis of one kind or another can drive you into bankruptcy and financial disaster. Is he right that half of us have less than $10K in savings? Sanders backup To our inquiry, a Sanders spokesman, Jeff Franks, said by email that Sanders relied on an April 2014USA Todaynews storyquoting a survey indicating 52 percent of U.S. workers had said they had less than $10,000 in total savings and investments, such as a 401(k) or IRA, that could be used for retirement. It did not include their homes or defined benefit plans, such as traditional pensions that could be used for retirement Specifically, the story said, 36 percent of workers said they had less than $1,000 in such savings and investments with another 16 percent of workers reporting $1,000 to $9,999 in such savings and investments. Those results came from a telephone survey of 1,000 workers and 501 retirees by the nonprofit Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald and Associates. Next, we spotted a chart on the institutes website drawn from the same 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey. The 52 percent of workers reporting less than $10,000 in savings and investments in 2014 is up from 39 percent in 2009, the chart shows. Of course, workers isnt all of us. We called the Washington, D.C.-based institute,which saysit was founded in 1978 to deliver unbiased information on employee benefit plans so that decisions affecting the system may be made based on verifiable facts. By phone, researcher Craig Copeland told us that overall, 51 percent of survey respondents, meaning retirees and others, had less than $10,000 in financial savings. Also by phone, Ruth Helman of Greenwald and Associates, which helped do the survey, paused at the senators wording. Strictly speaking, their savings account isnt correct. Its total savings wherever it may be, under the mattress or wherever, Helman said. Federal Reserve Bank We wondered if there were other ways of looking at savings. Several experts urged us to contact the Federal Reserve Bank, which conducts a survey focused on consumer finances every three years.Its latest survey, drawing on data collected in 2013, resulted in a chart pointed out by Copeland indicating that the median value of financial savings outside of a pension or home reported by the nearly 95 percent of families who had bank accounts or stocks, bonds and other financial assets that year was $21,200, down from $23,000 in the boards 2010 survey. SOURCE:Report,Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances,Federal Reserve Bulletin, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, September 2014 Copeland said that given that more than 5 percent of families reported no such financial assets, its reasonable to speculate that families overall had median financial savings of less than $20,000. We also asked reserve board officials to analyze the senators savings accounts statement. By phone, William Emmons and Bryan Noeth, both employed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, raised questions. For instance, why not count a familys home or pension as part of its savings? Reminder: The institute, with its focus on savings for retirement, set aside these asset categories. Emmons said: People do count on their housing equity, not only in retirement, but before that. Beyond that, the pair said, its not always meaningful to focus on money held in savings accounts, which are a single wealth indicator. A savings account isnt where everybody holds their money, Noeth said. The two said a potentially superior way to gauge how Americans are faring, savings-wise, would be to consider net worth meaning family assets compared to debts. An agency manager, Adriene Dempsey, emailed usa spreadsheetshowing that according to the boards 2013 survey, 26 percent of U.S. families had less than $10,000 in net worth--a tick worse than the 25 percent of families according to its 2010 study. In 2013, half of American families had about $81,500 in net wealth or more, according to the spreadsheet. Total assets for a family include financial assets, such as bank accounts, mutual funds and securities plus tangible assets, including real estate, vehicles and durable goods, according to aFebruary 2015 essayby the St. Louis Fed.Weve elaborated on this here. So by the net-worth metric, more families are better off than if one focused on financial savings alone. We ran this net worth angle past the institutes Coleman, who reminded by email that its survey (relied on by Sanders) took into account financial assets, not just savings accounts. Our ruling Sanders said: Half of all Americans have less than $10,000 in their savings account. Some clarification went missing here: A 2014 survey indicated about half of American adults had less than $10,000 in savings and investments, such as a 401(k) or IRA, that could be used for retirement; those results encompassed more than savings accounts. 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. On 1 October 2017, pseudoscientific alternative health website NaturalNews.com, which is geared primarily toward supplement enthusiasts with a discerning taste for deep state conspiracy theories, posted an article ("Dont Look Now, But Arctic Sea Ice Mass Has Grown Almost 40% Since 2012") that attempts to cast doubt on the scientific veracity of global warming by first presenting the following grotesque caricature of a straw man argument: article straw man One of the most popular pieces of "evidence" that climate alarmists just love to bring up to prove the global warming narrative is the "all the ice is melting in the Arctic and the polar bears are dying" line. Weve all seen the documentaries where a polar bear is desperately clinging to a tiny piece of ice and you just know hes going to die soon. They article then presents two observations that make the generally factual point that there has been relatively more sea ice in the Arctic and glacial ice on Greenland in 2017 than there have been at specific times in the recent past: The latest figures from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, located at the University of Colorado, show that sea ice extent has increased by 40 percent since 2012. [...] [The Danish Polar Portal reports that]: If we rank the annual surface mass balance since 1981 from low to high, the lowest on record was 2011-2012 (38 Gt) and this year is the 5th highest out of the 37 year record. Danish Polar Portal To be clear, the primary data scientists use to document global warming are records of Earth's temperature over time, not doomed polar bear imagery. Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist for the independent, nongovernmental Berkeley Earth research group told us in an e-mail that, in this area, pretty much "all groups who provide estimates" of global temperature unequivocally point to nearly uninterrupted temperature rises since the 1970s, as shown in this comparison of various estimates produced by the climate and energy policy website Carbon Brief: Zeke Hausfather produced   "People interested in global warming are best-served looking at actual global temperatures," Hausfather said. While this temperature trend is uncontroversial and clear, the climate system as a whole is a complex beast with numerous entangled parts. The basic approach to writing a blog post that "debunks" the concept of global warming is to highlight without explanation various parts of that system at a single point in time. NaturalNews.com is no exception to that basic strategy here. Arctic Sea Ice Natural News cites a climate change denial blog called ClimateDepot.com as evidence of the claim that sea ice has grown 40 percent since 2012. In reality, the claim made by this website was more specific and less useful. In a post dated 18 September 2017, Climate Depot stated: stated Arctic sea ice extent is up 40% from this date five years ago. "Sea ice extent" is one of many different metrics used to characterize the presence of sea ice, and is generally defined as "the area of ocean [based on pixels in satellite imagery] where at least 15 percent of the surface is frozen". On the day of 17 September 2017, sea ice extent was indeed higher than it was on 17 September 2012: defined   This does not mean, however, that sea ice has grown almost 40 percent since 2012, nor does it mean that the overall trend in arctic sea ice is toward growth  it hasn't and it isn't. The issue here is that sea ice extent is quite variable from year to year, and thus looking at two discrete points is a fairly useless exercise without the full context. "We don't expect it to monotonically decrease every year," Hausfather told us.  This chart (using data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center) shows September sea ice extent compared against the same average used in the maps cited by Climate Depot, showing both this aforementioned variability but also an overall trend of reduced ice extent. Note that the year 2012 was no random year to select for comparison; it is actually the record lowest year in terms of Arctic sea ice extent  making anything compared to it necessarily higher: from   The overall trend of declining sea ice is even clearer when you look at a different measure: sea ice volume (presented by the Polar Science Center, below). Not only do such records show a clear negative trend, they also show just how anomalous 2012 was as a data point: Polar Science Center   In reality, 2017 was the eighth lowest year on record for Arctic sea ice extent since satellite measurements began in 1978. But in no world but the pseudo-scientific fringe internet would the concept of global warming rely on every single year breaking the previous year's record for sea ice minimum. eighth Tom Karl, the former director of NOAAs National Centers for Environmental Information, told us that 2017's sea ice extent was still much lower than the 1980-2010 average (by two standard deviations), and that, despite claims to the contrary, "one can't look at a trend over 5 years and say much about the impact of global warming as other factors are also important on these short time scales." director Glacial Ice on Greenland The NaturalNews.com approach for glacial ice on Greenland was similarly lacking scale and context. The main source for these arguments was a completely legitimate end-of-year report put out by the Danish Polar Portal, a website run by the Danish Meteorological Institute. In that report, the organization makes this factual statement: report Heavy snow and rain in winter with a relatively short and intermittent summer melt season have left the Greenland ice sheet with more ice than has been usual over the last twenty years  in fact we have to go back to the 1980s and 90s to see a year similar to this one in terms of snow fall and ice melt. This statement, and the figures presented by NaturalNews.com, are referring to a metric known as Surface Mass Balance (SMB), which Polar Portal describes: describes Each year glaciers gain ice from snow and freezing rain and lose ice by melt that runs off. Adding these together gives the surface mass budget (SMB) in Greenland, the ice sheet typically gains mass from around September to May and loses more mass than it gains in the ablation [melting] season of June, July and August. Importantly, however, this measurement only presents half the picture in terms of how much mass is being lost from year to year from Greenland's glaciers. That's because it does not include the rather significant portion of ice that breaks  or calves  off into the ocean to melt elsewhere. On average this accounts for about 500 Gt [gigatons] of further ice loss. This, as stated in the Polar Portal post, nearly matches the estimated gain in SMB reported by Natural News, effectively canceling it out. In a post on Carbon Brief, analysts with the Danish Meteorological Society put this years measurement in context: post While the Greenland ice sheet has seen a neutral, or small positive, change in ice for this year, it should be noted that Greenland has lost approximately 3,600bn tonnes of ice since 2002. Like the record of Arctic sea ice earlier, when put in the context of the entire trend of Greenland's ice mass over time (presented by Polar Portal below), 2017's measurement does nothing to change larger and completely unambiguous trends of overall melting: Polar Portal    Further, in the case of Greenland's ice sheet, there is not much of a mystery surrounding the lackluster amount of melting this year; a massive storm  the remnants of Hurricane Nicole  parked itself atop the continent, dumping a large amount of snow on the ice-covered continent: Hurricane Nicole dumping Heavy rain and snow in October in especially eastern Greenland gave record totals of precipitation in the main east coast town of Tasiilaq as the remnants of former hurricane Nicole passed by and, much as with Harvey in Houston this year, got lodged over eastern Greenland for some days. However, after Nicoles extreme precipitation, the rest of the winter was actually pretty average in terms of the amount of snow that fell. Because neither the higher-than-2012 arctic sea ice from 17 September 2017 nor the neutral amount of ice loss in Greenland in 2017 do anything to disrupt the overall trends of decreasing ice, and because climatological science does not require (nor does it expect) ice or temperature records to be broken every single year, we rank the claim that these observations are reasons to doubt the tenets of climate change as false. Watson, Tracey.  "Dont Look Now, but Arctic Sea Ice Mass Has Grown Almost 40% Since 2012."
  Natural News.  1 October 2017. Mottram, Ruth, et al.  "Guest Post: How the Greenland Ice Sheet Fared in 2017."
  Carbon Brief.  1 September 2017. Polar Portal.  "End of the SMB Season Summary 2017."
  12 September 2017. Morano, Marc.  "Massive Arctic Ice Gain (Up 40%) Since Low Point of 2012.
  Climate Depot.  19 September 2012. Hausfather, Zeke.  "State of the Climate: Warm Temperatures and Low Sea Ice Mark First Half of 2017."
  Carbon Brief.  21 July 2017. National Snow and Ice Data Center.  "Arctic Sea Ice at Minimum Extent."
  19 September 2017. Polar Science Center.  "PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume Reanalysis."
  Accessed 4 October 2017. NASA.  "End-of-Summer Arctic Sea Ice Extent Is Eighth Lowest on Record."
  19 September 2017. NASA.  "NASA Sees Tropical Storm Nicole Going Extra-Tropical."
  18 October 2016. There's no evidence that Oprah Winfrey suffered a "tragedy" or died in early May 2022, nor did she endorse keto weight loss gummies. These claims, one of which resembled a death hoax, came from misleading text messages that were sent out to an unknown number of recipients. Oprah Winfrey keto Scammers sent the text messages with the words, "Fans react to the Oprah tragedy." The texts also included a link: Scammers Oprah    We don't recommend trusting text messages like these. Upon clicking the link, we were led to a fraudulent page that was purposely designed to mimic a Time magazine article. In reality, Time.com had nothing to do with the page. This bore similarities to another keto scam that used the image and likeness of "The Price Is Right" host Drew Carey, which we previously reported on days before publishing this story. Time magazine Time.com The Price Is Right Drew Carey reported The fake Time.com article mentioned nothing of Winfrey having died or suffered a tragedy, as the text messages were nothing more than misleading clickbait. The article falsely claimed Winfrey had personally endorsed keto weight loss gummies such as Keto Start ACV, Gemini Keto, Kwazi Keto Gummies, Slim Mediq Keto Gummies, Trim Life Keto + ACV Gummies, and perhaps others. It used both her image and likeness to sell the products. Winfrey Winfrey    Winfrey did not endorse any of these keto weight loss gummy products, nor did she die or suffer a tragedy in early May 2022. We noticed that the product name changed in the article when we refreshed. This perhaps indicated that the product name was rotated on a timed basis or that specific product names showed up in specific locations, depending on the user's IP address. Basically, the fake Winfrey endorsement was used for more than one keto gummies product. The articles on genuinesmother.com and newsurvey22offer.com began as follows: Oprah Launches First-Ever "Weight Loss Gummy" in Partnership with Weight Watchers After Being Forced to Lose 60 LBS in Just Weeks (Time) - In an insightful 1-on-1 interview, one of the world's most prominent talk show host reveals how she forced Weight Watchers to create a transformational weight loss product the world has never seen before. Gifted host, and business genius, Oprah Winfrey, made headlines after bringing the first ever "Weight Loss Gummy" to the market on live TV last week in memory of her heart failure just last year. Ever since Oprah was forced to lose 60 lbs due to her heart failure risk, Winfrey and her team have been working alongside the team at Weight Watchers to develop a better weight loss product that helps people quickly lose weight and keep it off for good. Oprah Winfrey Despite what's mentioned in the article, we found no evidence that Winfrey had suffered heart failure in 2021, nor did we find any data on Weight Watchers supposedly creating keto weight loss gummies. Both of these claims appeared to have been fabricated. Winfrey Weight Watchers The article went on to make the baseless claim that the long-running program "The Oprah Winfrey Show" had been "canceled because the producers were not happy with" her "weight and appearance." It also claimed that Winfrey appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" to promote the keto weight loss gummies that had supposedly been created by Weight Watchers. This also was false. Winfrey Ellen DeGeneres Weight Watchers The end of the page claimed that Winfrey herself was offering a "free" bottle of keto weight loss gummies to readers, whether that product be Keto Start ACV, Gemini Keto, Kwazi Keto Gummies, Slim Mediq Keto Gummies, Trim Life Keto + ACV Gummies, or another one. The article said, "The only thing you'll need to pay for is the shipping rate, which is less than $6!" Winfrey However, we read through the terms and conditions pages for the various products, which were not easy to find. The fine print said that purchasing a "free" bottle of the keto weight loss gummies enrolled customers in a "trial," "program," or "subscription" that would eventually charge the full cost on a monthly basis. One product's terms and condition page said the charges would occur "every 30 days after the initial purchase." In order to cancel a recurring order, customers would first need to contact the company to initiate the process. However, that might be a problem for anyone who opted for a "free" bottle of Kwazi Keto Gummies. In the terms and conditions for that specific product, it listed no phone number. The contact page on the Kwazi Keto Gummies website showed only this email address: care@buykwazi.com. Even worse, the area that was supposed to show the return shipping address was left blank, making it more difficult for people to get their money back:    A package won't get very far without a shipping address. We contacted Kwazi Keto Gummies to ask about the absence of the phone number and shipping address. Within minutes, the page with the fake Time.com article that used Winfrey's image and likeness changed to a fake keto endorsement from the cast of "Shark Tank," which we reported on before. It then switched to another scam page that claimed singer-songwriter Adele Adkins, better known simply as Adele, had also endorsed keto weight loss gummies. All of this was false. reported Adele In sum, no, there's no evidence that Winfrey suffered a "tragedy" or died in early May 2022, nor did she endorse keto weight loss gummies that had been created by Weight Watchers. All of this was misleading and false. Winfrey Weight Watchers