Biden, unleashed President Biden held his first news conference this week, two months and five days into his presidency. The back-and-forth with reporters lasted just over an hour and was heavy on immigration questions, yet no one asked Biden about the coronavirus pandemic. Biden was his usual self: Speaking fluently about big-picture policy issues, injecting emotion and personal stories to illustrate his points, and committing several flubs and errors when reciting the nitty-gritty details. We rounded up 10 claims in our fact-check. Some were clearly erroneous, others just missed context. In one case, Biden corrected himself mid-news conference. Biden: "Ninety of the Fortune 500 companies making billions of dollars not paying a cent in taxes." Biden usually is careful to say "federal taxes," but he dropped the qualifier in this instance. Simply saying "taxes" makes it wrong, because no matter what the federal tax liability, these companies certainly pay a variety of payroll, real estate and local or state taxes. In a 2019 report, the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) concluded that 91 profitable companies in the Fortune 500 did not pay any federal income tax, largely as a result of the 2017 tax law, such as through deductions for investment that President Donald Trump promoted in the bill. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. Markey's filibuster malarkey "The filibuster was created so that slave owners could hold power over our government," tweeted Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), the liberal lawmaker sponsoring the Green New Deal in the Senate. The filibuster certainly has been a tool used by enslavers and segregationists, who wielded it for nearly a century after Reconstruction to gum up the works of government and delay measures such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act from becoming law. Democrats who want the filibuster gone tend to point out this sordid history. Markey takes it much further by saying the filibuster was "created" so slave owners could run the government. But the filibuster's origins are not so tainted. Depending on which historical account you read, the earliest use of the Senate filibuster can be traced to 1790, 1837 or 1841. None of these involved enslavers' issues. In fact, the first officially recorded filibuster was a move by Whig senators to keep in place a censure against President Andrew Jackson. Historians note that John C. Calhoun, a prominent Southerner and defender of slavery, was an early adopter of the filibuster as a tool to delay legislative action. Fair enough. But he didn't create it. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. By Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Adriana Usero ● Read more » | | | | 
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