Fact check: did FEMA funding get diverted to ICE? - Entrepreneur Generations

In a time where accusations of 'fake news' run rampant and news publications are under the microscope, it's more important than ever for journalists to get the facts right. That's why each Monday from now until Election Day, we're going to run an item listing a few of the most relevant items from FactCheck.org. It's a well-sourced, non-partisan free service run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. We encourage you to subscribe to their alerts, which you can do here.

As Hurricane Florence ravages the mid-Atlantic states, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said the federal government shifted nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Robert Farley reports. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both agencies, denied the accusation and said the money represented savings from FEMA's routine operating expenses that came in under budget, and was not taken from hurricane disaster response. But FEMA's Operations and Support fund, from which the $9.8 million was transferred, plays a role in disaster response. In the end, whether the $9.8 million could have helped with hurricane response, it's a tiny fraction of the $26.5 billion in FEMA's disaster relief fund.

In two early morning tweets, President Trump rejected the claim that an estimated 2,975 Puerto Ricans had died because of Hurricane Maria, and made some false and misleading claims, FactCheck reports. Trump said that the hurricane-related death toll in Puerto Rico was from 6 to 18, but Puerto Rico's earliest estimates of the death toll was 64. Trump claimed that the higher death estimate was done by Democrats to make him look bad, but it was found by an independent study commissioned by Puerto Rico and carried out by George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health. Trump said the study counted deaths for unrelated causes such as old age, but that was untrue. He also said he was "successfully raising Billions of Dollars" for Puerto Rico, but the White House has not provided proof of that claim.

In a Sept. 7 speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, former President Barack Obama said that Republicans' changes to the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act has caused more than 3 million Americans to lose their health insurance. "That’s according to one estimate, but another found no significant change in the rate or the number of uninsured from 2016 to 2017," Lori Robertson reports. "As politicians are wont to do, Obama cherry-picked the higher figure that more strongly supported his point."

In that same Sept. 7 speech, President Obama said it's important not to threaten the freedom of the press, and that even though he complained about Fox News, he never threatened to shut them down or called them enemies of the people. "The Democratic president did more than complain. His administration at times took action against the cable network. The Obama Justice Department surveilled one of Fox News’ reporters, and a White House spokesman acknowledged excluding Fox News from interviews," Eugene Kiely reports. "And while he may never have called Fox News “enemies of the people” — a phrase President Donald Trump has used repeatedly for the media at large — Obama did say that its 'point of view' was 'ultimately destructive' to the U.S."

In an Aug. 30 rally in Evansville, Ind., President Trump made three unsubstantiated claims about wind turbines: that a single turbine can kill thousands of birds, that wind not blowing causes "problems", and that living near turbines is noisy enough to make someone "go crazy after a couple of years," Jessica McDonald reports. In fact, a 2013 study estimated that each turbine causes about five bird deaths per year, power grid operators can easily handle sporadic periods without wind, and people living near turbines are rarely exposed to sound levels above 45 decibels, which McDonald says is about as much as a humming refrigerator.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/2D58pz6 Fact check: did FEMA funding get diverted to ICE? - Entrepreneur Generations

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