WASHINGTON ― Of the many questions surrounding House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and his conduct in investigating President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the most puzzling has to be his explanation for his recent visit to the White House grounds. People who have worked in the White House suggest that, on this matter, Nunes and the White House simply aren’t being credible.

For those just catching up: Last week, Nunes caused a stir when, with no prior notice to his fellow committee members, he announced that he’d received information showing that Trump transition officials had been caught inadvertently in surveillance operations targeting suspected foreign spies, and that their names appeared in internal intelligence reports. No one seemed to know where Nunes had gotten this information, and the congressman, who went to the White House to brief the president on his findings, would only say that he had an anonymous source. He has refused to name his source even to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Nunes ditched his own staff the night before making his announcement. On Monday, the news broke that he had gone to the White House grounds to use a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility ― basically, a room or area that meets certain rigorous security standards ― to get the information that formed the basis of his accusations.

This raised the distinct possibility that the White House itself had been the source of the information, and that it had given that information to Nunes so he could provide Trump with some cover for his baseless accusation that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower. (The FBI and Nunes himself have said there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims.)

The White House and Nunes both deny that there was any collusion, and the White House has argued that it is possible Nunes came to the grounds without anyone from the administration knowing about it.

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Apparently Elon Musk isn’t busy enough. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has started yet another company, Neuralink, which aims to make implants for the human brain that can wirelessly interface with a computer, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

The technology, according to Musk — who brought up the idea at Recode’s Code Conference last year — is a “digital layer” located above the cortex, built into the brain. Musk calls the technology, which would intertwine computers and the human brain, “neural lace.”

Neural lace could help humans keep apace with rapidly accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence, which Musk said will cause humanity to “be left behind by a lot.” With the help of brain implants that are directly linked to computers, humans may be able to improve their brain function, or even one day download their thoughts or upload the thinking of others.

In the more near term, neural lace technology could be used to treat brain diseases like epilepsy or Parkinson’s.

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During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. "It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they're about to get served," Coler says.

"We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

WASHINGTON — [font size="+1"] A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.[/font]

The attack stems from two years of effort by Senator Marco Rubio and others in Congress to undermine a key financing mechanism in the law. So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

Mr. Rubio’s efforts against the so-called risk corridor provision of the health law have hardly risen to the forefront of the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but his plan limiting how much the government can spend to protect insurance companies against financial losses has shown the effectiveness of quiet legislative sabotage.

The risk corridors were intended to help some insurance companies if they ended up with too many new sick people on their rolls and too little cash from premiums to cover their medical bills in the first three years under the health law. But because of Mr. Rubio’s efforts, the administration says it will pay only 13 percent of what insurance companies were expecting to receive this year. The payments were supposed to help insurers cope with the risks they assumed when they decided to participate in the law’s new insurance marketplaces.
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Throughout President Trump’s first 100 days, the Fact Checker team will be tracking false and misleading claims made by the president since Jan. 20.

Jump to the full list

Trump has been in office for 67 days. As of our latest update on day 63, we’ve counted 317 false or misleading claims.

Highlight claims about: (this categorizes lies by topic)
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WASHINGTON ― Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants the Senate to delay a vote on President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick as long as Trump’s campaign remains under investigation by the FBI.

Democrats have struggled to come up with a cohesive strategy on how to handle the vote to confirm Neil Gorsuch, whom Trump picked in January to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat on the high court.

On Monday, FBI Director James Comey confirmed in his testimony to Congress that his agency is investigating ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“There is a cloud now hanging over the head of the president, and while that’s happening, to have a lifetime appointment made by this president seems very unseemly and there ought to be a delay,” Schumer told reporters on Tuesday.

The only reason Gorsuch has a chance to win confirmation now is because Republicans refused to even hold a hearing for President Barack Obama’s nominee after Scalia died in February more than a year ago. Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, went through all the motions of meeting senators, but Republicans refused to consider him because Obama was going to leave office in a little less than a year.
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The possibility of their losing money was referred to as the “risk corridor,” and the ACA explicitly filled those risk corridors with a guarantee of making the insurance companies, at the very least, whole.

And then something happened. As The New York Times noted on December 9, 2015, “A little-noticed health care provision slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.”

Rubio and a number of other Republicans had succeeded in gutting the risk corridors. The result was that, just in 2015, end-of-fiscal-year risk corridor payments to insurance companies that were supposed to total around $2.9 billion were only reimbursed, according to Rubio himself quoted in the Times, to the tune of around $400 million. Rubio bragged that he’d “saved taxpayers $2.5 billion.”

And, indeed, he had. But the insurance companies were thrown into a crisis. And, with Republicans in Congress absolutely refusing to re-fund the risk corridors, that crisis would get worse as time went on, at least over a period of a few years.

So the insurance companies did the only things they could. In (mostly red) states with low incomes and thus poorer health, they simply pulled out of the marketplace altogether. This has left some states with only one single insurer left. In others, they jacked up their prices to make up their losses.
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rump’s lies aren’t just a problem for Washington insiders and the media. They’re having a tragic effect on actual lives – even the lives of people who supported him.

One such supporter is Helen Beristain. She believed Trump when he said he was only interested in deporting hard criminals. This week, she learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) is scheduled to deport her husband, Roberto Beristain – owner of a popular restaurant in a conservative community in Northern Indiana – to Mexico tomorrow.

We know what you’re thinking. Helen’s husband must be one of Trump’s ‘bad hombres,’ a drug dealer, perhaps, or maybe a rapist, or a gang leader. Not exactly.

His crime that ran him afoul of Trump’s deportation force? Accidentally entering Canada 17 years ago.

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The Republican plan to repeal Obamacare remains deathly unpopular, and the GOP have foundered in their attempts to lie their way into higher approval numbers for the plan. But that did not stop Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) from trotting out the desperate and false claim that Medicaid expansion killed 80,000 Medicaid recipients.


(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

One of the key obstacles to the success of the Affordable Care Act was the sheer volume of lies that were fed to the American about the bill, often abetted by the press.

This time around, though, those lies have failed to weaken support for the now-popular Obamacare, or to garner any support for the Republican repeal plan.

But that reality did not stop House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) from throwing out a desperate whopper during a CNN interview, claiming that Medicaid expansion has caused “80,000 more deaths attributable to Medicaid care”:
(please go to article to see the schmuck make this statement on video)

"And then if you look at where the majority of the people went, they went on Medicaid, and historically if you compare Medicaid, the outcome of service to other parts of the industrialized world, it has some of the poor, worst performing outcomes. In fact, since the Affordable Care Act came in, there’s been over 80,000 more deaths attributed to Medicaid care, and we want people to have access, but more importantly, we want them to have access to quality care."

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