Biden kicked his ass tonight as expected. I was hoping the podium would slide away from the orange fool as he leaned on it for support. Falling on his mouth would be oh sooooo fitting.

Fact-checking Donald Trump, Joe Biden in the final presidential debate

By PolitiFact Staff, October 22, 2020, Source - https://www.politifact.com/art...biden-final-preside/

Donald Trump and Joe Biden at the final 2020 presidential debate. (AP)

This story will be updated.

The final presidential debate between former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump may have had fewer interruptions, but it wasn’t any more truthful.

The claims came thick and fast about the coronavirus, immigration, health care and race issues. Let’s get right to the fact-checks.

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False. "Rounding the corner" suggests that significant and sustained improvements are being made in the fight against the virus, and that’s not the case, according to the data.

The number of coronavirus cases is climbing once again, after falling consistently between late July and mid-September. Cases are now at their highest point since early August, with almost 60,000 new confirmed infections a day. That’s only about 10% lower than the peak in late July.

Hospitalizations today are lower than in previous spikes, but in the past few weeks, there has been a modest increase. The positivity rate, which measures what percentage of tests come up positive for the virus, is also going up again during the past few weeks. Higher positivity rates are an indicator of community spread.

The one encouraging change is that, since a peak in August, deaths have fallen fairly consistently, due to a combination of factors, including improved understanding of how to treat the disease. Yet deaths have settled in at about 800 a day, keeping total deaths per week in the United States above normal levels.

We rated a similar claim Pants on Fire. While there are some similarities between both Biden’s and Trump’s plans to combat COVID-19, experts told us any pandemic response plan should have certain core strategies. The Trump administration has released no comprehensive plan to combat COVID-19, except in regard to the development and distribution of vaccines. Trump’s main intervention was implementing travel restrictions, while efforts to roll out a widespread testing plan faced difficulties.

Biden released a public COVID-19 plan — the first draft was published on March 12, 2020. It included public health measures such as deploying free testing and personal protective equipment, as well as implementing economic measures such as emergency paid leave and state and local fund emergency funds.

His claim about the estimated deaths rates Mostly False. Trump frequently refers to this number to claim that his administration’s moves saved 2 million lives. However, the number is from a mathematical model that hypothesized what would happen if, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., people continued to live their daily lives as normal, and neither people or governments changed their behaviors, a scenario that experts consider unrealistic. The U.S. also has the highest death toll from COVID-19 of any country in the world, and one of the highest death rates. Credit for shutting down the economy also doesn’t primarily go to Trump, but rather to states and local jurisdictions. In fact, Trump encouraged states to open back up beginning in May, even when there were high rates of COVID-19 transmission in those areas.

We rated a similar claim False. It is one of Trump’s favored shots to say Biden isolated himself in his basement. In the first few months of the pandemic, Biden did run much of his campaign from his Delaware home. He built a TV set in his basement to interact with voters virtually. But that changed.

In September alone, Biden gave remarks and held events in Kenosha, Wisc., Lancaster, Pa., Warren, Mich., Tampa, Fla., Charlotte, N.C, and more. We counted 14 locations.

This is wrong. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not affiliated with any political party. He also hasn’t endorsed any parties or candidates.

This is largely accurate. When Biden claimed during the first debate that Trump "still won’t offer a plan," we noted the Trump administration’s "Operation Warp Speed" for vaccine development as well as its more detailed plan for vaccine distribution. But the administration has not released a comprehensive plan to address COVID-19.

(AP)

This needs context. Biden appears to be referring to a revised stimulus package the House passed Oct. 1. The measure would allocate a total of $225 billion to "support the educational needs of states, schools districts, and institutions in response to coronavirus," according to a summary from Democratic staff on the House Appropriations Committee.

Trump tweeted Oct. 6 that he instructed representatives to stop negotiating on that bill until after the election. He has since expressed interest in passing more relief, even floating the idea of a more expensive bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said he’s been "all over the map."

This is inaccurate. Over the summer, Florida, Texas and Arizona experienced record surges in cases that later eased — but now they are all seeing new surges. Over the past week, the New York Times’ tracker notes, new infections are up 29% Florida, 16% in Texas and 55% in Arizona, compared with two weeks earlier.

This lacks hard evidence. When Trump first made this claim, he said Biden’s son Hunter Biden received the money. Extending the charge to the former vice president lacks any proof whatsoever. But here’s what we know about the origin of this claim.

A report issued by the Republican majority on the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees said Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer had a financial relationship with Elena Baturina, the widow of a man who had been mayor of Moscow until 2010. As its source, the report cites undisclosed documents. Without seeing the documents the Republicans have relied on, this accusation remains unproven.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer said Biden did not get $3.5 million from Baturina and that the report has a key error. Democratic staff on the Finance and Homeland Security committees said they have seen all the documents and that no information in the committees’ possession shows that Hunter Biden had any financial interest in the transaction.

This is accurate, according to tax records obtained earlier this month by the New York Times. The Times reporting showed a previously unknown account that, according to Trump’s attorney, Alan Garten, remained open as of the publication of the story on Oct. 20.

According to the Times, Trump’s returns show that he has maintained bank accounts in three foreign countries — the United Kingdom, Ireland and China — that had not been disclosed before, including in Trump’s candidate financial disclosure forms. The account was in the name of a Trump-owned subsidiary, Trump International Hotels Management LLC. The leaked returns showed that $188,561 was paid from the account to cover taxes to the China government between 2013 to 2015.

Garten told the Times that the company had opened an account with a Chinese bank in order to pay local taxes associated with efforts to explore possible hotel deals in Asia, but that no deals materialized.

This is misleading. Trump’s own lawyer was quoted in the New York Times article that revealed the existence of the bank account, and he said that "the bank account remains open."

However, the lawyer, Alan Garten, told the newspaper that the account had been opened to "pay the local taxes" associated with efforts to strike hotel deals in Asia, and that when "no deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized," the account has remained "inactive" since 2015. The Times’ investigation confirmed tax payments made from the account from 2013 to 2018.

This is disputed. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, warned Trump in 2019 that his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, was the target of a Russian disinformation campaign in Ukraine and that any information he brought back from the country should be viewed with skepticism. In December 2019, Giuliani went to Ukraine in an attempt to gather evidence of corruption by Biden and his son Hunter. The Post article quotes four former intelligence officials who said that Giuliani was seen interacting with people affiliated with Russian intelligence agencies on the trip. One of these former officials said that Trump "shrugged his shoulders" and seemed to discount O’Brien’s warning. However, in a written statement, National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot told the Post that its characterization of the meeting with O’Brien was "not accurate."

Oversimplifies. Hunter Biden’s position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company when Biden was vice president raised ethical questions.

"It was a mistake for Hunter Biden to join the Burisma board, particularly given that the vice president was the senior U.S. official engaging Ukraine," said Steven Pifer, a career foreign service officer who was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton and deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs under President George W. Bush. "Hunter Biden should have been more mindful of his father's position."

In 2014, the White House responded by saying members of the Biden family were "private citizens and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the Vice President or President."

When Biden launched his presidential campaign, his Republican critics pointed to a meeting he had in Ukraine in 2016 that led to the ouster of the country’s top prosecutor while the energy company was under investigation. Biden had boasted about that meeting, so it was no secret. He told Ukraine’s president that a $1 billion loan guarantee was at stake unless the prosecutor left, a demand that  also came from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund who saw the prosecutor as corrupt.

Biden’s conduct has been verified by many U.S. and European officials. The prosecutor’s office was not actively investigating the energy company at that time. A Republican Senate committee report that dug into Hunter Biden’s activities in the Ukraine also presented no evidence that Joe Biden used improper influence or wrongdoing.

Mostly False. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services, the broadest measurement of the balance of trade, was smaller under Trump in 2019, the most recent full year, than it was in any of the final three years of the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice president.

Biden’s campaign pointed to a narrower measure — trade in goods only — which shows that the trade deficit with China has generally been higher under Trump than it was under Obama. But even here, the U.S. made progress under Trump in 2019 in whittling down the goods deficit.

(AP)

This distorts the record. Biden has offered a variety of Social Security plans. Starting in the 1970s, he called for an increase in monthly benefits, then for a one-year freeze, then floated raising the retirement age, then backed a change in how benefits would increase. Today, he calls for higher monthly checks for the oldest beneficiaries.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Biden spoke in favor of Social Security freezes  to rein in spending and reduce the deficit. Biden’s point was that no part of the government would be exempt from the effort to balance the budget.

As vice president during the Obama administration, Biden generally focused on protecting Social Security, and resisted moves to privatize.

This needs context. The Social Security chief actuary did say that if the Social Security portion of the payroll tax were eliminated, the program would run out of money in three years. However, the chief actuary added that he was unaware of any plan to end the payroll tax, and the Trump campaign has said there is no plan to do so.

The White House has said that Trump favors something more limited: to forgive the taxes that would have been due from a four-month payroll tax holiday he enacted by executive order to ease the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has also mused about terminating the tax, which would put the program under great financial strain.

However, Trump also said he would look to Congress to maintain the program in that scenario by drawing on general revenues — potentially in excess of $1 trillion a year. The actuary said that if that approach were taken, it would leave benefits essentially unaffected. Even if Trump wanted to eliminate the payroll tax, he couldn’t accomplish it unilaterally; he’d need Congress to go along.

No evidence. In 1993, Biden gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he said the country should focus on young people who had no supervision or opportunities. Otherwise, they’d "become the predators 15 years from now," he said. Biden did not single out Black Americans.

"Madam President, we have predators on our streets, and society has in fact, because of its neglect, created that," he said, according to the Congressional Record.

The term "superpredators" refers to something Hillary Clinton said in 1996 when referring to a "gang of kids." She did not specifically say superpredators were Black Americans, but decades later Clinton apologized for the comment.

This is misleading. Biden’s campaign pointed to Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing the federal prison population was 179,898 in 2018, down about 38,000 from a peak of 217,815 in 2012. The 38,000 figure was cited in a letter by the ACLU sent to Senate leadership at the end of 2018.

But that statistic reflects only the net change in the federal prison population, not the number of people who were released. Moreover, it cherrypicks the high point during Obama’s tenure, and compares it with a year during Trump’s tenure.

A better measure is to compare the number of federal prisoners in 2008, the year before Obama became president, with his final year. Federal statistics show there were 201,280 federal prisoners in 2008 compared with 189,192 in 2016, a decline of about 12,088.

Historians dispute this. The claim overstates Trump’s own standing within history, historians say. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a skilled legislator from his years in the Senate, deliberately crafted his civil rights agenda and pushed it through Congress with personal persuasion. President Harry Truman moved to desegregate the military, and even President Richard Nixon, who was captured on tape making racist remarks, advanced the desegregation of schools and affirmative action in employment.

This is an exaggeration. When Trump signed the bipartisan FUTURE Act in 2019, he did make permanent $255 million in annual funding for minority-serving colleges, including roughly $85 million allocated to historically Black colleges and universities under a Title-III program. But Trump can’t claim he gave them more money than Obama did, or that he "saved" them.

HBCUs got money via the same program every year while Obama was president, according to the U.S. Education Department. Trump’s budget proposals for the last three years show that the White House repeatedly requested less in discretionary funding through the program than Congress provided.

Two experts crunched the numbers on HBCU funding for PolitiFact using data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Ivory Toldson, a Howard University professor who served as an HBCU liaison for the Obama administration, said HBCUs got $1.9 billion from the federal government in appropriations, grants and contracts in 2017-18, compared with between $1.8 billion and $2.4 billion annually under Obama.

This needs context. Both the Obama and Trump administrations used chain-link enclosures to hold immigrants at border processing facilities. The term "cages" has been used by Trump critics to describe this type of enclosure.

The claim about cages came during a question about family separations at the southwest border. The separations occurred under the Trump administration’s "zero-tolerance" policy to prosecute all adults crossing the border illegally, while their children were sent to the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, which placed them with sponsors (such as family members), in shelters, or foster homes.

The Obama administration did not have a policy to separate families arriving illegally at the border.

This one is messy. Biden has misstated his own position at least once in the past, but his opponents have taken that misstatement and wrongly presented it as his position.

Biden’s position is that the United States needs to transition away from fossil fuels, but he doesn’t want to ban fracking outright. Instead, he opposes fracking on public lands and wants to stop the federal government from issuing new permits for drilling. He says that he’ll allow fracking to continue on private lands, where most of it takes place.

Biden did misspeak during a debate with Bernie Sanders in March 2020 when he said he supported a ban on "new fracking." He walked back those remarks the same day and has repeatedly said since then that he doesn’t support a ban on fracking right now.

This is basically true. When Trump suggested the noise of wind turbines causes cancer in April 2019, we rated that Pants on Fire.

"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value," Trump said at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser. "And they say the noise causes cancer."

There are no studies that support Trump’s statement that windmills and cancer are somehow linked. When we looked for evidence in 2019, we found a report from the Australian Parliament’s Select Committee on Wind Turbines. The report found anecdotal reports of discomfort from people who lived near windmills, and the list of ailments it heard was long. But no one complained of cancer. In its final 2015 report, the committee said more evidence was needed to establish a link to any illness.

This is slightly exaggerated. Trump did trail Clinton in the money race, and his ability to win despite that shortfall was notable. However, Trump had access to more than a "tiny fraction" of Clinton’s war chest.

Trump’s campaign directly raised $333.1 million in 2016, which was just shy of 60% of the total that Clinton raised, $563.8 million.

If you combine the amounts that each campaign raised with the amounts raised by independent groups aligned with that candidate as well as their national party committees, Trump and his allies were able to count on about $1.4 billion, which was about 68% of the $2.06 billion Clinton raised.

False. No evidence has surfaced to suggest Obama or Biden ever spied on Trump’s campaign, ordered a wiretap on Trump Tower, or initiated or meddled in the FBI’s work looking into possible coordination between members of Trump’s campaign and Russia.

The wiretapping claim has been dismissed as unsubstantiated by lawmakers from both parties, intelligence officials and the Justice Department.

As part of the Russia probe later led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the FBI investigated four men in the Trump campaign’s orbit. A report from Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz concluded that the investigation was justified and not politically motivated.

A separate probe Attorney General William Barr commissioned into the "unmasking" of Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn concluded without any criminal charges or findings of wrongdoing, according to news reports.

This story includes reporting by Jon Greenberg, Louis Jacobson, Amy Sherman, Miriam Valverde, Bill McCarthy, Samantha Putterman, Daniel Funke and Noah Y. Kim of PolitiFact,, and Victoria Knight and Emmarie Huetteman of Kaiser Health News.

This boldfaced liar said Tony Fauci is a Democrat.

Trump must have been pissed that a colour woman put him in his place, during the debate.

@Former Member posted:

This boldfaced liar said Tony Fauci is a Democrat.

She did a fantastic job.

@Mitwah posted:

She did a fantastic job.

I meant Trump lied about Fauci.

@Tola posted:

Trump must have been pissed that a colour woman put him in his place, during the debate.

Trump indeed messed himself both ways.

@Former Member posted:

Trump indeed messed himself both ways.

If Trump can mess himself playing golf, just imagine what would  happen if he pretends to be  president.