Senile Joe became Racist Joe this week, with one of the most amazingly ill-considered answers since Gerald R. Ford said Poland didn’t suffer from Soviet domination. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
Warning: This week is going to be Twitter-heavy.
Let’s jump right into the controversy that may convince DNC insiders that they can’t afford to go into the general election with Biden as their candidate:
"If you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black."
— Lawrence B. Jones III (@LawrenceBJones3) May 22, 2020
Charlamagne tha God (AKA Lenard Larry McKelvey), the black radio host who interviewed Biden, did not find his apology compelling. “It has to come to the point where we stop putting the burden on black voters to show up for Democrats and start putting the burden on Democrats to show up for black voters.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
If you were born black, then you will die black. There is no such thing as being 'politically black'. This is nonsense designed to CONTROL you and keep you needy.
NOBODY can take away your âBlacknessâ. Your âBlack Cardâ is your birthright. Regardless of who you vote for. (12/14)
How is the media spinning Biden’s huge gaffe? Either the tried to gaslight us that it was a “joke” or says the real story is, as always, Republicans pounce.
Of course that’s not the only bad news to befall the Biden campaign this week. The Ukraine scandal continues to look worse and worse for Biden and his spawn:
Yikes!!!! This is not a âperfect conversationâ
An audio recording of a conversation between Joe Biden and Petro Poroshenko on May 13, 2016 – YouTube https://t.co/7R2YxzDpGM
None of this necessarily means that Tara Readeâs story is true. But the evidence is fairly convincing that Readeâs story is not just a campaign-season invention.
One point in Readeâs favor, in contrast to Blasey Ford, is how she has handled her accusation. She made (as Young notes) a few edits to one of her blog posts to tailor it more closely with her current story, but unlike Blasey Ford, she did not delete her social-media history to erase all traces of political rants (even the embarrassing Putin stuff) before coming forward. She was not initially rolled out by a public-relations firm and a partisan lawyer (though she has since retained an attorney who is a Trump donor). She has not hidden behind her representatives to carefully stage-manage who could talk to her, and under what conditions; while she has canceled a few interviews and seems hesitant to appear on Fox News, she has sat for lengthy questioning on and off air by a diverse array of outlets ranging from left-wingers such as Halper, to ex-Fox personality Kelly, to the Times, Post, CNN, the Associated Press, Vox, and National Review. Maybe Reade is enjoying the publicity, but she is not hiding from questioners.
One columnist declared that former Vice President Joe Biden could boil babies and she would still vote for him. Feminist leaders have said they believe Biden raped a Senate staffer but they still endorse him. Good government advocates have opposed any investigation into prior sexual harassment or corruption claims against Biden. It seems politicians and pundits alike have discovered the glory of the âpresidential bull.â In this instance, Biden is akin to a papal indulgence that allows writers, members of Congress and journalists to forgive any sin in a holy crusade to retake Washington.
In the 11th century, Pope Urban II formalized the use of indulgences, which could be purchased to forgive sins. A papal bull of the Crusade accompanied those who fought in the Holy Land and committed atrocities in the name of a higher order. The practice was defended as essentially drawing from the âtreasury of meritâ created by Jesus Christ, the saints and the faithful.
Now the 2020 election has become the ultimate crusade, and President Trumpâs critics seem to be enjoying indulgences in tossing aside moral and ethical considerations. The freedom that is Biden is nowhere more evident than in a recent column by The Nationâs Katha Pollitt, who wrote about the allegations of sexual assault made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade. Pollitt dispensed with any struggle over feminist or moral qualms, declaring, âI would vote for Joe Biden if he boiled babies and ate them.â
As Pollitt explained, âWe do not have the luxury of sitting out the election to feel morally pure or send a message about sexual assault and #BelieveWomen.â Otherwise, Pollitt would have to deal with her column during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, in which she denounced âsome of his defenders [who] seem to be saying that even if the allegations are true, it shouldnât really matter.â
The most hilarious thing about Joe Biden's ongoing series of self-immolations is that all he has to do to win the presidency is what comes naturally: lying around being technically alive in a basement. And he can't.
But actually having won election as U.S. Senator, Klobuchar clearly has a more plausible case than Stacey Abrams:
Her attempt to leverage a failed Georgia gubernatorial bid into a spot on the Democratic ticket is so brazenly absurd that itâs hard to think of precedents.
But the 46-year-old African-American activist isnât one to be constrained by standard political practice â or reality. She refused to concede her narrow but clear 2018 gubernatorial loss, instead alleging sheâd been undone by a massive voter-suppression scheme.
As she put it at a recent event, âmalfeasance and incompetence and my opponent, who was a cartoon villain, stole the voices of Georgians.â Usually, candidates who wonât acknowledge defeat are written off as sore losers. Such is the Âinflamed, paranoid state of Dems in the Trump era that rather than being embarrassed by the Georgianâs graceless and unsubstantiated claims of electoral theft, they have embraced and parroted them.
Abrams could be forgiven for thinking that if she could get her party to accept she is the rightful governor of Georgia, she has a chance to convince it that she Âdeserves to be a heartbeat away from the presidency in the administration of a 78-year-old man.
By her own estimation, sheâd be an âexcellent running mate.â She has no doubt that sheâs prepared to be president on Day One and touts her foreign-policy credentials of having visited more than a dozen countries.
President Trump has rewritten the rules of political experience, yet itâs still a stretch to imagine someone who has only served in the Georgia legislature â and as a state representative, not even a senator â is ready to become leader of the Free World. Even Pete Buttigieg has more executive experience.
Snip.
Abrams can reasonably boast of an ability to stoke turnout among minority and young voters â she won more votes than any state-wide candidate in Georgia ever. But given her high-octane progressivism, sheâd have limited appeal to working-class swing voters and suburban women. By picking her, Biden would also be undermining one of his chief arguments, namely, that heâs a low-risk, experienced, steady hand.
This means that Abrams is likely to be passed over â and, if the past is any guide, conclude that she got robbed.
Why water heaters, dryers and freezers aren’t eligible I couldn’t tell you, but if you needed to get any covered appliances, this weekend is a good time.
There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect thatâs because General Flynnâs identity was not âmaskedâ in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.
âUnmaskingâ is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been âincidentallyâ monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.
The first is âtraditionalâ FISA â the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign powerâs agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign powerâs suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.
The second kind of FISA collection occurs under Section 702 of the statute. It brings under FISC jurisdiction various intelligence-collection programs that target categories of non-Americans outside the United States. These foreigners also communicate with Americans, so the latter are incidentally intercepted.
Under federal law, both kinds of FISA collection are subject to so-called minimization procedures. These aim to safeguard the privacy of Americans who have been incidentally monitored. When raw intelligence is refined into intelligence reports (including transcripts of recorded conversations) that are disseminated to U.S. officials, the identities of these Americans do not appear. Rather, a designation such as âU.S. Personâ is substituted â the âmask,â as it were.
If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question â usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests. This underscores that unmasking â because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans â is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.
With that as background, letâs get back to Flynn.
For three years, weâve been led to believe that Flynnâs December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was âroutinelyâ monitored. (Kislyak was replaced as ambassador in 2017.) That is, Kislyak was an overt agent of Russia, stationed at its embassy in Washington, so the FBI kept tabs on him. Indeed, the âroutineâ-surveillance story line was repeated by the New York Times just this week.
The implication is that Kislyak was probably subjected to traditional FISA surveillance by the FBI; or, since he lived in Russia and traveled to other places when not in America, perhaps he was also a FISA Section 702 target. In either event (or both), Kislyak was interacting with Americans, who were thus incidentally intercepted.
That, the story goes, is what must have happened to Flynn. Trumpâs designated national security advisor was unmasked because, once intelligence agents intercepted the December 29 phone call, they decided it was essential to identify the person with whom the Russian ambassador was discussing sanctions that President Obama had just imposed against Moscow.
I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynnâs unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call.
Timeline details and Strzok-Page comms snipped.
Well, the possibility that first leaps to mind is: Maybe Flynn was a FISA surveillance target. That is, his interception was not incidental. Rather, the FBI was monitoring him under FISA because he was a suspected agent of a foreign power â the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that canât be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBIâs abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI ârequested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.â (IG Reportâs âExecutive Summary,â p. vi.)
It is more likely, then, that the FlynnâKislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.
Snip.
Readers of my book Ball of Collusion know I have argued that the Obama administrationâs TrumpâRussia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBIâs July 2016 opening of âCrossfire Hurricane.â I believe there were several strands of the TrumpâRussia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trumpâs entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated â Iâm tempted to say colluded! â with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail.
Barack Obama warned his successor against hiring Michael Flynn. It was Nov. 10, 2016, just two days after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the presidentâs warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.
The question of why Obama was so focused on Flynn is especially revealing now. The Department of Justice recently filed to withdraw charges against the retired three-star general for making false statements to the FBI in a Jan. 24, 2017, interview regarding a phone call with a Russian diplomat. The circumstances surrounding the call and subsequent FBI interview have given rise to a vast conspiracy theory that was weaponized to imprison a decorated war hero and a strategic thinker whose battlefield innovations saved countless American lives. There is no evidence that Flynn âcolludedâ with Russia, and the evidence that Flynn did not make false statements to the FBI has been buried by the bureau, including current Director Christopher Wray.
So if the Obama administration wasnât alarmed by Flynnâs nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obamaâs No. 1 target? Why were officials from the previous administration intercepting his phone calls with the Russian ambassador?
The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iranâthe Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate heâd advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran dealâthey smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.
Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., criticized her own party’s coronavirus legislation this week as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pressured the Republican-controlled Senate to adopt what Porter described as a Democratic “wish list.”
âThe HEROES Act is dead on arrival,” Porter said Tuesday, referring to the $3 trillion package the House passed last week as a follow-up to the CARES Act. Her comments during an online meeting hosted by the Tustin [Calif.] Democratic Club were first reported by the Washington Examiner.
“There was no bipartisan negotiation here and no effort at bipartisan negotiation,
Snip.
But tucked into the legislation are provisions that rankled the Republicans, including expanding $1,200 checks to certain undocumented immigrants, restoring the full State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) that helps individuals in high-taxed blue states, a $25 billion rescue for the U.S. Postal Service, allowing legal marijuana businesses to access banking services and early voting and vote-by-mail provisions.
“I did find myself, Porter said, “on the House floor thinking [of] my Republican colleagues who said, âThis bill is a Democratic wish list written by a handful of Democrats, and shoved down the throats of the rest of the Congress.’
Restoring SALT is a giveaway to blue state billionaires. Sounds like the marijuana banking part should be passed, but there’s no reason to cram it into a coronavirus relief bill. And the early voting and vote-by-mail provisions are designed to help further voting fraud. Speaking of which:
A former Judge of Elections in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been charged and pleaded guilty to illegally adding votes for Democrat candidates in judicial races in 2014, 2015, and 2016.
On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against former Judge of Elections Domenick DeMuro, 73, for stuffing the ballot box for Democrats in exchange for payment by a paid political consultant.
The charges, and guilty plea, include conspiracy to deprive Philadelphia voters of their civil rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific Democrat candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections and a violation of the Travel Act.
âThe Trump administrationâs prosecution of election fraud stands in stark contrast to the total failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce these laws,â Public Interest Legal Foundation President Christian Adams said in a statement. âRight now, other federal prosecutors are aware of cases of double voting in federal elections as well as noncitizen voting. Attorney General William Barr should prompt those other offices to do their duty and prosecute known election crimes.â
As Judge of Elections, DeMuro was paid to oversee the election process in the 39th Ward, which encompasses Philadelphia.
DeMuroâs guilty plea states that he was paid by a political consultant to illegally add votes for particular Democrat candidates in primary judicial races. The political consultant who allegedly paid DeMuro had been hired by those Democrat candidates.
According to the indictment, the political consultant allegedly solicited payments from Democrat candidates who hired him, classifying them as âconsulting fees.â The payments â which ranged from $300 to $5,000 â were then allegedly used to pay Election Board Officials, such as DeMuro, in exchange for those officials illegally adding votes for the consultantsâ Democrat candidates.
In addition to certifying fraudulent results to help Democrats, DeMuro also took a hands-on approach to voting fraud: “Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)
Several posts here suggested that Sweden’s model of reaching herd immunity might be a better method than what we were doing. Now that the data is in: not so much. “Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita.”
Speaking of data, the way media dashboards count the numbers are skewed high. “At the time of Coloradoâs announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNNâs âdashboardâ and all the other media reports, stood at 1,150 statewide. But only 878 of those, more than 23 percent less, are identified as deaths due to COVID-19.”
CNN has staked out a position in its coverage of Wuhan virus that can only be explained in one way. They perceive a drawn-out lock down of America as something that will damage President Trumpâs reelection chances and therefore it is something to be preserved. The move by a handful of governors to re-open their states to normal life despite the latest pronouncement from the latest M.D. or Ph.D. who fancies himself as Galactic Commander, threatens to reveal the Wuhan virusâs new clothing, so to speak. Therefore, anything that can be done to discredit the incontrovertible data that shows whatever threat Wuhan virus presented is now largely abated must be discredited.
More tests are being given, and the positives rate is actually declining.
Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown: “No shopping in open counties for those in closed counties!”
Speaking of California: More suicides than coronavirus deaths? I know that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote,” but maybe somebody should run the numbers…
Is Tesla planning a Gigafactory near Austin? There are still big tracks of land available out near 130…
Wargaming a war between the U.S. and China in 2030. Don’t be so sure they could knock out our carriers with hypersonic missiles, and our drones and submarines would wreck havoc with their trade.
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine professor and former Cleveland Clinic employee was arrested Wednesday over his alleged ties to China.
The Justice Department announced that Qing Wang was arrested at his Shaker Heights, Ohio home as part of a joint operation conducted by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Service Office of the Inspector-General. Wang was charged with wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that Wang and his research team at the Cleveland Clinic had received from the National Institutes of Health.
According to the criminal complaint, Wang failed to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities. He also allegedly failed to disclose that he had received grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for a nearly identical research project. He held the title Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Cleveland Special Agent-in-Charge Eric Smith said this wasnât âa simple case of omission, â adding that âWang deliberately failed to disclose his Chinese grants and foreign positions and even engaged in a pervasive pattern of fraud to avoid criminal culpability.â
The 40-year old girlfriend of 74-year old former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst cracked two of his ribs. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Magazine publisher Conde Nast lays off about 100 employees. Maybe the entire Teen Vogue Anal Sex department got laid off. Hopefully there are some good Python courses available in their area…
Universally respected mystery expert Otto Penzler was let go as editor of the Best American Mystery Stories of the Year so the publisher could pick stories based on “affirmative action” criteria rather than excellence.
When you're 24 and break into a 73 year-oldâs house and threaten him and his wife with a knife and don't know he was a boxer, a marine, and hand-to-hand combat instructor. pic.twitter.com/Ep5pao8GKN
Evidently Joe Rogan just inked a deal with Spotify reportedly worth over $100 million to make his podcasts exclusive to Spotify by the the end of the year.
This is a very lucrative deal for Rogan, but it’s probably a very savvy move for Spotify as well, the way Sirius XM expanded their market by locking up Howard Stern.
In a very possibly related story, Rogan is also considering moving to Texas:
Here, then, is an honest assessment of the pros and cons of moving to Texas:
Pros
He will save literally millions of dollars by moving to Texas. California’s top income tax rate is 12.3 percent on taxable income of $572,981 and above. Texas’ top income tax rate is 0%. Assuming the Spotify deal was broken up into four yearly chunks of $25 million each, he would save over three million a year in income taxes every year of the deal by moving to Texas.
Your money also goes a lot farther in Texas than California. $1 million will buy you a house in Los Angeles, but in Texas it will buy you a mansion.
Fiscally responsible government means that, unlike California, Texas isn’t going to go bankrupt due to unsustainable public pension debt.
Traffic in Austin or Dallas isn’t exactly good, but it is compared to LA traffic.
Political correctness and Social justice Warriors have less power in Texas.
No earthquakes, and about 98% lower wildfire chances.
The flight time to the east coast (and, indeed, most of America) is a lot shorter from Texas.
No insane hostility to lawful gun owners.
Good deer and wild pig hunting in Texas.
Texas BBQ beats the hell out of California BBQ.
TexMex > Californiamex.
Cons
It’s hot as hell in the summer.
You can’t legally smoke marijuana in Texas.
A lot fewer movie and TV acting gig.
Not nearly as many celebrities within driving distance of your podcast.
There are probably more comedy clubs in LA than all of Texas combined. (Of course, with $100 million, he could always build himself a really nice comedy club in Texas…)
I’m betting California sushi is better than Texas sushi.
So in summary: Come on down, Joe!
California is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there…
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!
Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word âhydroxychloroquineâ or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.
Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include âcorticosteroidsâ and âMethylprednisolone.â
What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.
“Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmerâs COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a âsuper spreaderâ event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are âracist and misogynisticâ and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.
Whitmer told ABCâs âThe Viewâ that the protests are âreally politicalâ as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.
âThis is not appropriate in a global pandemic,â she said. âBut itâs certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.â
I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs â leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmerâs opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.
Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time heâs been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.
Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.
According to Paxtonâs office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:
Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.
Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because theyâve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, theyâve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers arenât going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.
Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that theyâd voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parentsâa majority at some schoolsâhave decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. Itâs lockdown by mob.
To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so itâs not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if youâre all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.
Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
Related:
Comey: 'We Did Not Spy—We Just Observed And Reported Secretly Without The Subject's Knowledge Or Consent' https://t.co/h3uoUi1JKB
Shurer fought his way *up* a mountain, into machine gun fire, RPGs, etc, neutralizing countless jihadis in the process, getting shot, but still moving forward, to render aid to & evac his brothers that were pinned down. His story is awe inspiring. RIP.https://t.co/jHgoR1XLKC
— Jordan Schachtel (@JordanSchachtel) May 15, 2020
TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.
The New York Times reports that âSimon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.â
âHe worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,â the report notes, adding that âhe warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.â
The report explains that Angâs alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.
Who let the goats out?! đ A herd of 200 goats roamed the streets of a San Jose neighborhood on Tuesday after breaking through a fence. Full story: https://t.co/nlHZA6livTpic.twitter.com/NEAp36bJsb
The mainstream media bristles at President Donald Trump’s description of them as “fake news” and “enemies of the people,” then go out of their way to prove his assessments accurate.
CBS News crew pulled medical professionals off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS film crew would have a long line for their COVID-19 coverage.
âOur insider witnessed the whole thing and came to Project Veritas, because he knew we would protect him,â said James OâKeefe, the founder and CEO of Project Veritas.
âThe insider told us that medical personnel were taken away from treating patients and making the line longer for actual patients wait for the COVID-19 test,â he said.
In an interview with the insider, OâKeefe asked the insider: âYou’re telling me you’re a hundred percent certain that CBS News, CBS News Corporation–national, staged a fake event. They faked the news. They faked the reality and broadcasted that to all of their audience last Friday on âCBS This Morning.â
The insider said to him: âA hundred percent. Absolutely.â
Nick Ross, a corporate cleaning site supervisor at the Cherry Health facility, said he was there when the CBS News crew arrived and set up the video shoot at the COVID-19 testing site in the parking lot, “Apparently the news crew wanted more people in the line because they knew it was scheduled.â
Maria Hernandez-Vaquez, a professional registration specialist, told the insider that Cherry Health Director of Quality and Informatics Glenda Walker helped to organize the facilityâs workers into the COVID-19 testing line.
The old school media used to claim that it reported the news “without fear or favor,” but today’s media shows plenty of both. Everyone involved in this piece at CBS News should be fired for cause for actively faking news. Of course they won’t be, since defeating President Trump and defending the Democratic Party (and its agenda) are far more important goals to them than reporting the news objectively.
Time for another roundup of Chinese lies and perfidy!
Remember all that blather about how there was “no way” the Wuhan coronavirus could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Yeah, not so much:
A US government analysis leaked to the Washington Times concludes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Chinese CDC is the “most likely” source of the COVID-19 pandemic which has killed over 200,000 people worldwide in roughly four months.
The document, compiled from open sources and not a finished product, says there is no smoking gun to blame the virus on either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, both located in the city where the first outbreaks were reported. -Washington Times
And while we may not have a smoking gun proving that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab, “there is circumstantial evidence to suggest such may be the case,” according to the report.
Also, it’s perhaps the world’s easiest game of connect-the-dots;
In 2013, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology collected horseshoe bats at a cave 1,000 miles away infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. (Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19. -WSJ)
Peng Zhou, WIV’s head of Bat Virus Infection and Immunization, was researching “the molecular mechanism that allows Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses to lie dormant for a long time without causing diseases,” while a press release from his lab was titled “How bats carry viruses without getting sick.”
Zhou’s colleague, Shi Zhengli, has been involved in bioengineering bat coronaviruses – co-authoring a controversial 2015 paper which described the creation of a new virus by combining a coronavirus found in Chinese horseshoe bats with another that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice.
In 2015, Nature magazine expressed concern over Zhengli’s experiments with bat coronavirus. The same year, the US government suspended funding to the lab due to their concern over risks of experimenting with bat coronavirus.
Meanwhile, the US State Department warned over safety standards at the Wuhan lab in a series of cables beginning in 2015, according to the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin.
Chinese health officials were drawing up plans to combat the CCP virus, which they knew to be infectious, days before they informed the public about its potential to spread, according to internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times.
The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. The virus has since spread to more than 200 countries and territories, causing more than 61,000 deaths in the United States alone.
China officially confirmed that the virus could be transmitted between humans on Jan. 20, when top respiratory expert Zhong Nanshan made the announcement.
Now, internal documents provided to The Epoch Times show that Beijing covered up what it knew, as central authorities were secretly providing directives to regional governments on how to cope with the outbreak.
On Jan. 15, the regional health commission in northern Chinaâs Inner Mongolia issued a âsuper urgentâ emergency notice to its municipal counterparts, explaining how medical facilities should respond to a new form of pneumonia. The notice said that Chinaâs National Health Commission had implemented treatment and prevention measures for local health agencies to deal with the new disease (now known as COVID-19).
During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign policy was largely based on assumptions that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread communism worldwide; they possessed strategic patience and were adaptive in pursuing their goal. The USSR would never be Americaâs partner but a long-term rival, and therefore it must be contained. Moreover, U.S. decision-makers assumed that American society would fully support this approach.
However, after the end of that confrontation, strategists like former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger falsely assumed that Communist China could be changed into a benign actor, even a âresponsible stakeholder,â or strategic partner of the U.S. were the U.S. to engage with China, believing that Chinaâs rise was a positive thing.
We argue that China is not just a rival but a formidable enemy. Its goal is not just to weaken America but supplant it and the liberal international order it created with a Communist ideology-based model of global governance. The PRC is more dangerous than the Soviet Union because it is unpredictable and more formidable. It is an amalgamation of a rapidly rising power and an ideological regime with an aggressive leader in Chairman Xi Jinping. Xi is both extremely ambitious and paranoid about his regimeâs security as well as his own. These factors make this enemy far less certain than the Soviets.
Additionally, China is far more formidable than the Soviet Union because it has learned key lessons from the USSRâs mistakes regarding competition with the United States. It is an extremely adaptive adversary. So adaptive that it has been seen as a partner rather than an enemy for a generation. Moreover, it was so highly valued as a partner that it was brought into the Western economic ecosystem to be allowed and encouraged to prosper. Chinaâs rapid growth was made possible by the U.S. government, business, financial markets, and universities, as well as its own efforts. Close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, even in the wake of the coronavirus.
Fundamentally, there remain sectors in U.S. government, business, and intellectual communities who still see China as a partner and want to return the Sino-American relationship to ânormalcy.â Even in the wake of the coronavirus, close ties between the American elite and Chinese business interest remain strong, and there is an assumption that things will return to normal once Trump leaves office.
Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.
Like the United States, another hard-hit regionâNorthern Italy, so progressive and tonyâhad swung its toll gates open. Italy outsourced whole production lines to China.
Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The toll gates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement.
Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington Stateâlocal Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland.
And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.
Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. More than 100,000 Chinese citizens moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought up Italian firms.
See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipediaâs telling, is home to far and away âthe highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.â
Courtesy of an Italian strain of COVID-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April, it was said that âcoronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.â
In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.
The Westâs political and corporate leaders, not Chinaâs, had opened their borders to the worldâs flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people.
The sphinxly Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. Gates also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say âlives,â because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the entire means of production.
As the Wuhan coronavirus continues to spread, stay at home orders have shut down commerce in many parts of the world. Some have predicted a 40% contraction in the U.S. economy in the 2nd quarter of 2020. This means that Chinaâs economy, heavily dependent upon exports, will see no economic rebound for quite some time. In the mean time, the Trump administration has âturbochargedâ its effort to relocate global supply chains from China to markets less hostile to the West.
Details on manufacturing and commerce imploding in Q1 snipped.
This gives the Trump administration more ammunition in its attempts to move global supply chains away from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reuters reported on Sunday:
Now, economic destruction and the massive U.S. coronavirus death toll are driving a government-wide push to move U.S. production and supply chain dependency away from China, even if it goes to other more friendly nations instead, current and former senior U.S. administration officials said.
âWeâve been working on [reducing the reliance of our supply chains in China] over the last few years but we are now turbo-charging that initiative,â Keith Krach, undersecretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment at the U.S. State Department told Reuters.
The report describes a âwhole-of-governmentâ effort in which free trade advocates seem to be losing their struggle with China hawks inside the administration. Citing national security concerns, many departments have joined in the process to figure out how to incentivize U.S. firms to move their operations out of the Chinese mainland. Options reportedly include âreshoringâ subsidies, tax incentives, developing closer ties to Taiwan, and ever higher tariffs on goods produced in China.
Teng Biao, a former fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s human rights center, attempted to host a panel discussion on Chinese human rights issues in 2015. A vice dean at Harvard Law School, however, ordered him in February of that year to cancel the event because it would have been “embarrassing” for the university, according to Teng.
“He called me into his office and he told me that the Harvard president was meeting Chinese president Xi Jinping,” Teng told the Washington Free Beacon. “It seems that for Harvard leaders, it was very embarrassing if we had a talk at Harvard about human rights issues in China when the Harvard president just came back from China after meeting with the Chinese president.”
Teng is a human rights lawyer who fled China after authorities kidnapped and tortured him for his participation in the 2014 Hong Kong protests. Professor William P. Alford, a vice dean at the Harvard Law School, played a role in bringing Teng to Harvard. He also ordered Teng to cancel the event, according to the Harvard Crimson. Alford confirmed with the Free Beacon that he told Teng to postpone the event, a decision he made on his own accord, rather than at the administration’s urging. He said that he allowed Teng to host other events during his time at Harvard. While Teng did participate in other events, he said the panel discussion was never rescheduled.
Evidently having a $40 billion endowment just isn’t enough to keep you from having to suck up to communist China…
Europe: “Hey China, want to help us create a vaccine for this coronavirus of yours?” China: “Go flu yourself!”
If you want to see exactly how China lies about the Wuhan Coronavirus, here’s an example:
— Ambassade de Chine en France (@AmbassadeChine) April 30, 2020
Compare those statements to this timeline to see everything they left out. (Hat tip: Neontaster.)
Speaking of propaganda:
The past 6 months have seen a massive uptick in new Twitter accounts from Chinese diplomats & embassies around the world. Many post accusations, boasts & name-calling directed at governments & individuals they feel have insulted China. @BethanyAllenEbrhttps://t.co/kml5BkNKbd
Speaking of willing dupes: “POLITICO Peddles Red China Propaganda Attempting To Own TrumpâGets SLAMMED On Twitter.” “POLITICO promoted a piece praising the Chinese Communist Partyâs handling of the coronavirus outbreak and blasting the Trump administration.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Sadly, foreign news outlets seem more immune to China’s influence than our own MSM:
Phenomenal: Very much worth watching. Germanyâs largest newspaper shows courage & clarity. Is ANYBODY at NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, WaPo, NYT, Bloomberg willing to demonstrate even a fraction of this journalistic integrity? Or are the $$ from the Chinese market all you care about? https://t.co/KgR7o1nrks
Is the Tara Reade rape allegation going to be the silver bullet that drops Biden? It seemed unlikely when the story first broke, but just enough supporting evidence has come to light, and just enough Democrats not acting like total hypocrites and supporting an investigation into the charges, that the scandal won’t go away.
Oh, and New York just threw Bernie Sanders off the ballot. Funny how things like that happen when you cross the DNC. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
The New York Times follows up the Tara Reade story with news that activist womenâs groups and key Democratic officials have not remained entirely silent about the allegation of sexual assault. Over the last three weeks, those groups have pressed Joe Biden to speak out and deal with Readeâs allegations, and they have held their fire after being promised action.
Now, however, theyâre tired of getting strung along â and may soon make their unhappiness public:
âą Is a Democrat âą Verifiably worked for Joe Biden âą Accused Joe Biden of sexual assault âą Has 4 witnesses saying she told them about it around the time she says it happened, 1 is a Biden supporter âą Video of her Mom calling Larry King for advice after her firing
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen “Lockdown” Whitmer saysnot every sexual assault claim is equal. Of course she does; her party has always treated those against someone with a (D) after their name as unworthy of investigation.
Women’s groups on Biden accuser Tara Reade: “Who?”
NYT editorial board: "This is so important that it can't be investigated by reporters…it can only be investigated by the Democratic National Committee…which will clearly not have any biases." pic.twitter.com/O5mNgdpOfw
If I was facing a constant stream of claims that Iâm throwing my husband into the most stressful job in the world as his brain turns to tapioca pudding, I probably wouldnât put out a video where I do all the talking and he looks like someone struggling to stand on his own. https://t.co/Wm0rQoZUOP
The operative question for many in the press as they assess Tara Readeâs assault allegation against Joe Biden is the correct one: Is Tara Reade telling the truth? It does not matter what other senators may or may not have done to other women in other places or at other times. It does not matter â for purposes of establishing Joe Bidenâs culpability â whether the Long Arc of History Bends toward Justice, whether other women who look like Tara Reade were assaulted by men who look like Joe Biden, or whether it would facilitate a more equitable future if we jettisoned Joe Biden, guilt be damned. What seems to matter to the media, for purposes of assessing Bidenâs candidacy, is whether then-senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. digitally penetrated Tara Reade in 1993.
But this, crucially, is not what mattered to these same media players when then-judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of assault, then indecent exposure, then gang rape in a series of successively more lurid allegations. What mattered then were not only the merits of Christine Blasey Fordâs accusation â and thatâs Dr. Ford, to you â but also the behavior of parties completely unrelated to those allegedly involved in the assault, parties who, by accident of birth, happened to look like Brett Kavanaugh, grow up like Brett Kavanaugh, and inhabit the âworld of privilegeâ that Kavanaugh allegedly inhabited.
Joe Biden is being treated as an individual â a man being accused of a specific crime that either did, or did not, occur. Brett Kavanaugh was treated as a totem â an antihero, an anti-messianic stand-in for all of Historyâs various Straight White Men who âgot away with it,â who were cushioned from the vagaries of life by their unthinkable âprivilege,â lashing out against the browning of America and the long-prophesied end of the Old Boysâ Club.
The problem with defending due process in a case like Bidenâs with respect to Tara Reade is that Biden himself, when it comes to allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, doesnât believe in it. Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administrationâs overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Bidenâs strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense.
Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen noted the consequences of Bidenâs crusade in The New Yorker last year. âIn recent years,â she wrote, âit has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses ⊠According to K.C. Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and an expert on Title IX lawsuits, more than four hundred students accused of sexual misconduct since 2011 have sued their schools under federal or state laws â in many cases, for sex discrimination under Title IX. While many of the lawsuits are still ongoing, nearly half of the students who have sued have won favorable court rulings or have settled with the schools.â
On Fridayâs Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and heâs toast.
Under Biden, Title IX actually became a force for sex discrimination â as long as it was against men. Emily Yoffe has done extraordinary work exposing the injustices of the Obama-Biden sexual-harassment regime on campus, which have mercifully been pared back since. But she has also highlighted Bidenâs own zeal in the cause. He brushed aside most legal defenses against sexual harassment. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, for example, Biden righteously claimed that it was an outrage that any woman claiming sexual assault should have to answer questions like âWere you drinking?â or âWhat did you say?â âThese are questions that angered me then and anger me now.â He went on: âNo one, particularly a court of law, has a right to ask any of those questions.â
Particularly a court of law? A court cannot even inquire what a woman said in a disputed sexual encounter? Couldnât that be extremely relevant to the question of consent? Or ask if she were drinking? It may be extremely salient that she had been drinking â because it could prove rape, if she were incapacitated and unable to consent and sex took place. But Bidenâs conviction that young men on campus should be legally handicapped in defending themselves from charges of sexual abuse occluded any sense of basic fairness.
Early Presidential race dropout California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell thinks Reade’s claim should be investigated. How many of you had “Eric Swalwell” on your Biden Scandal Bingo cards? Now put your hands down you damn liars!
“Big money donors are pressuring Joe Biden against picking Elizabeth Warren for VP: ‘He would lose the election.'” For once, big donors and Bernie Bros are on the same page…
“Blue-check feminist who was AOK with innocent men losing jobs over false allegations believes Tara Reade but still voting Biden.”
How desperate are Democrats? Desperate enough to float a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama ticket, Constitution be damned. (The author’s attempt to tapdance around the constitutional issue should cause thousands of legal scholars to faceplam themselves.)
The Tara Reade rape-accusation scandal isn’t going away, nor is the Bejing Biden tag, no matter how hard Team Joe might try to jujitsu it away. Plus Q1 fundraising numbers drop. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
A new piece of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Readeâs claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Readeâs mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.
In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to âLarry King Liveâ on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughterâs experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Bidenâs office. âI remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,â Reade told me.
Reade couldnât remember the date or the year of the phone call, and King didnât include the names of callers on his show. I was unable to find the call, but mentioned it in an interview with Katie Halper, the podcast host who first aired Readeâs allegation. After the podcast aired, a listener managed to find the call and sent it to The Intercept.
On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, âWashington: The Cruelest City on Earth?â Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Readeâs last month of employment with Bidenâs Senate office, and, according to property records, Readeâs mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:
KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.
CALLER: Yes, hello. Iâm wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.
KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didnât tell it?
Given that Daou’s Clinton sycophancy meter was pegged at 11 in 2016 (even Renfield told him “dial it back”), that gives some credence to the “replace Biden with Hillary at the convention” conspiracy theory. But Daou went all Bernie Bro in 2019, so maybe he’s just disgruntled. Or maybe he was only a Clinton mole the entire time pretending to be a Bernie Bro. Or maybe…(leads pack mule back to the Sierra Madre)
For months now, it has been clear that Biden family corruption will be a campaign issue. The impeachment focused attention on ties between the vice presidentâs son, Hunter, and the corrupt Ukrainian oil and gas giant Burisma. But Hunter had equally close, equally profitable ties to Chinese state-owned banks. Those connections were formed when Joe Biden was leading the Obama administrationâs policies toward both China and Ukraine.
Cozy, profitable, and possibly corrupt connections with the Chinese government are the last thing Americans want to hear about their politicians right now. Those voters are closeted at home, worried about their future, thanks to a virus that originated in Wuhan. They are mad as hell at Beijing for hiding what it knew, early on, about the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party knew something terrible was happening, and it refused to share honest information about it. It denied the virus could be spread by human contact, weeks after it knew patients were infecting health care workers, and it hid vital information about the origins and genetic structure of the virus. The World Health Organization spread that misinformation. Beijingâs deception cost lives and livelihoods. Americans are reminded of it every day they are home from work or school under quarantine.
This anger at Chinaâs rulers is bad news for Joe Biden. Voters see China as a rising threat and its economic gains as coming out of American pockets. The Trump campaign was already pushing these issues. It wonât have any trouble tying them to Joe Biden and making his family the face of American elites who profit from their insider positions.
Today @JoeBiden confused the Dem PA Governor Tom Wolf for Dale Wolf.
"All Daleâs been saying, Governor Wolf"
Joe confused him for Dale because a man named Dale Wolf (R) was Governor of Delaware in 1993. Dale is 95 years old. What decade is Joe living in? pic.twitter.com/VGopJwpgnh
Gore looks like he needs to invest in some sunblock.
“Joe Biden: Unfit to Serve by Any and Every Measure.” It’s sort of a Greatest Hits of Biden incompetence. “You might think that after five decades of experience with public policy both foreign and domestic that you’d be able to discern Biden’s governing philosophy, even given his inability to express a coherent thought. But you’d be wrong. The lessons and experiences that inform a person’s decisionmaking seem to pass completely through Biden’s brain without leaving a trace of residue.”
“Joe Biden Advisor Tries to Blame Republicans for Small Business Loan Money Running out. It Doesnât Go Well.”
New York Times does a Biden in quarantine piece. Anything remotely interesting or unexpected? (scans) “At times, callers deduce from rowdy background noise that Mr. Biden is working beside his German shepherds, Major and Champ.” Good for him. Also:
The former vice president also places calls to mayors and governors; congressional leaders like Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina; elder statesmen like Al Gore; potential running mates; donors; and former rivals like Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren. A few governors have become favorite points of contact, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, Jay Inslee of Washington and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Oh yeah, pick Gretchen Whitmer as your running mate. That move is gonna make you super popular…
There is simply no way Biden can out-hawk Trump on China. Some of the premises of this piece are ill advised, but the conclusion is not.
The implication of Bidenâs new ad is that China didnât give Trump timely information about the COVID-19 outbreak, because Trump wasnât tough enough on Chinaâs leaders. The commercial mocks Trumpâs praise for Xi Jinping and is filled with supposedly damning images of Trump and Xi together. By contrast, it shows Biden vowing, âI would be on the phone with China making it clear: We are going to need to be in your country. You have to be open. You have to be clear. We have to know whatâs going on.â In other words, Biden would boss the Chinese around.
This is a jingoistic fantasy. China is a rival superpower run by an authoritarian and fiercely nationalistic regime. Biden canât force it to comply. When Beijing has given the United States valuable information about virus outbreaks in the past, itâs because American presidents spent time and money building joint U.S.-Chinese initiatives and took pains to make Chinaâs leaders feel like equals. In 2009, Bidenâs then-boss, Barack Obama, stood on a stage with the Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Beijingâin the kind of scene Biden mocks in his adâand said the two governments should âbuild upon our mutual interests and engage on the basis of equality and mutual respect.â The two leaders announced that they would âdeepen cooperation on global public health issues, including Influenza A (H1N1) prevention, surveillance, reporting and control.â As the Rand Corporationâs Jennifer Huang Bouey has noted, this cooperation hastened the development of an H1N1 vaccine. In suggesting that Biden could bludgeon China into submissionâin a phone call, no lessâthe Biden campaign is peddling a lie about how public-health cooperation with China actually works.
This Dem-leaning piece is way too kind on China (as you would expect), but is correct that trying to spin Biden as “tough on China” is absurd.
Reporter tries to nail President Trump for having a rally in early March. Know who had rallies later in March? Biden. To be fair, they were much, much smaller rallies than Trump’s…
The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other handâthe waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others â are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200. Let them eat cake, you know?
The rape allegation against Biden slowly percolates out into the mainstream media, Biden’s brain melts (more), Slow Joe stumbles through interviews (again), and more memes than you can shake a stick at. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
A remarkable thing happened Monday: The New York Times executive editor, Dean Baquet, actually had to answer questions about his paperâs very different coverage of sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh. It did not go well. It is simply impossible to read the interview and the Times coverage of the two cases and come away believing that the Times acted in good faith or, frankly, that it even expects anyone to believe its explanations. The paperâs motto, at this point, may as well be âAll the News Youâre Willing to Buy.â
For all their lectures to the public about transparency and fearless independence, prestige journalists tend to be very reluctant to face accountability of their own. Ben Smith, who only recently left his position as editor in chief of BuzzFeed for a perch as media reporter for the Times, deserves credit for putting Baquet to some tough questioning. Letâs walk through the Timesâ very belated report on the Biden allegations and Baquetâs defenses of that reporting. The article, blandly titled âExamining a Sexual Assault Allegation Against Biden,â ran on page A20 of the Easter Sunday edition of the paper. On the same day, the Times opinion page ran a much more visible op-ed by Biden himself on his proposals to reopen the country.
Snip.
Tara Reade was one of the women who accused Biden in early 2019, but at the time, she did not accuse Biden of sexually assaulting her by penetrating her with his hands under her skirt, as she has now. Biden has never been asked personally to respond to Readeâs allegation. The Times assigned multiple reporters to the story but printed his campaignâs formal denials without addressing whether it had asked Biden himself to comment. Its report expressed no concerns that there has been inadequate investigation of the charge.
Smith started off by asking Baquet why it took until April 12 for the Times to even mention the allegations, which were made in a podcast interview on March 25 and reported at National Review and elsewhere within days:
Lots of people covered it as breaking news at the time. And I just thought that nobody other than The Intercept was actually doing the reporting to help people figure out what to make of it. . . . Mainly I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his partyâs nominee. Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But Iâm not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing.
So much for âAll the News Thatâs Fit to Print.â This does not pass the laugh-out-loud test. Does any sentient being believe that the Times would have waited more than two weeks to even mention such an allegation against a Republican or conservative figure, while it tried to figure out how to tell its readers what âhe or she needs to think about what to make of this thingâ? Recall its wall-to-wall instant coverage of the Trump âAccess Hollywoodâ tape, which by the next day had a full news analysis by Maggie Haberman asking why Trump had not apologized yet.
In Kavanaughâs case, on September 14, 2018, before Christine Blasey Ford had even put her name to a public allegation against Kavanaugh, the Times published a 31-paragraph story on the then-anonymous charge. Two days later, the very day that Ford agreed to come forward publicly, the Times blared out a Sheryl Gay Stolberg story, which opened
President Trumpâs bid to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was thrown into uncertainty on Sunday as a woman came forward with explosive allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers more than three decades ago.
Unlike here, the story led with the most inflammatory line in Fordâs allegations (âI thought he might inadvertently kill meâ) and contrasted that with what it described as âa terse statementâ from the White House, terms it did not use in framing the allegations against Biden. Then, the Times complained that âsome of the presidentâs allies on the right excoriated Ms. Ford â a registered Democrat â as a partisan.â Here, regarding Reade, the Times reported its reasons for skepticism of her political motivations (supporting Marianne Williamson, then Elizabeth Warren, then Bernie Sanders) without putting those accusations in the mouths of people primed to be disliked by Times readers.
Snip.
It got worse: When undeniably disreputable figures came out of the woodwork to offer lurid and preposterous tales of Kavanaughâs supposed predations (many of which have since been recanted or thoroughly debunked), the Times ran with them. As Smith notes, when since-convicted lawyer Michael Avenatti pushed forward the charges by Julie Swetnick of Kavanaughâs involvement in gang rapes, âThe Times wrote that story the same day she made the allegation, noting that ânone of Ms. Swetnickâs claims could be independently corroborated.ââ Baquetâs response:
Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaughâs status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And when I say in a public way, I donât mean in the public way of Tara Readeâs. If you ask the average person in America, they didnât know about the Tara Reade case. So I thought in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment. . . . Kavanaugh was a running, hot story. I donât think itâs that the ethical standards were different. I think the news judgments had to be made from a different perspective in a running hot story.
This is entirely circular: If the media make something a story, it becomes newsworthy; if itâs not reported, the readers donât know about it, so itâs not newsworthy. No purer distillation can be found of the idea that the media set their own agenda.
How on earth do you pretend that Joe Bidenâs character is not instantly newsworthy? Heâs the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for president. He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. Heâs been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the HillâThomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing?
We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were âa job interviewâ and heâd be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isnât this Bidenâs job interview?
Rick McHugh previously reported on Weinstein’s many victims, so he’s not new to this rodeo.
In the interview below, he says the following:
* Tara Reade says she told her mother, her friend, and her brother about the sexual assault just after it happened. The mother has passed, but the friend and brother confirm they were told about this at the time.
* He further says his interviews of the friend and brother were “not short conversations,” but long ones, where he “drilled down” to discover if their recollections matched the story Reade was telling now. He says they do in fact match.
* He notes further that the timing of this claim tracks with Reade’s sudden demotion at the Senate.
* Tara Reade says she also filed a complaint with the Senate about sexual harassment (not assault, which happened later) after her complaint to the Biden staff was ignored. McHugh cannot find this document, but says it seems to be located (assuming it exists) at the University of Maryland’s collection of Joe Biden’s papers — which is conveniently under seal.
“NYT: We Looked Into the Accusations Against Joe Biden and Determined He’s A Democrat“:
âWhile the charges of sexual assault by Bidenâs former aide, Tara Reade, are something we would call extremely credible in any other situation,â reads the article, âour investigation revealed that legitimizing them would be politically unhelpful to Democrats. Thus we conclude the allegations are false for reasons we will fill in later — unless we can just go back to not talking about them and not give any reasons at all. We also find it absolutely necessary to consider Bidenâs habit of inappropriately touching women to be âcharming.ââ
CNN? Not so much. The published over 700 articles on Christine Blasey Ford, but as of April 16 had yet to mention Tara Reade.
CNNâs political campaign against Kavanaugh included sympathetic articles toward Blasey Ford, hostile articles about Kavanaugh, supportive pieces about the importance of believing women even when they provide no evidence, hostile pieces about the danger of due process and empathy for men, and targeting of key Republican senators. CNNâs work culminated with their award-winning efforts to sway Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, broadcasting a confrontation between a professional activist and the wavering senator.
Itâs a low bar but Tara Readeâs accusation is undoubtedly stronger than the one made against Kavanaugh. Unlike Blasey Ford, she told multiple people about the alleged incident at the time it happened, not three decades later. And unlike Blasey Ford, she has evidence she met the accused, in her case when she worked for him in the U.S. Senate.
Since then they’ve done one article on her April 17, then mentioned her in another.
Former Bill Clinton advisor Dick Morris doesn’t think Biden has the stuff. “Itâs hard to see. Itâs like a suicide march with them. But theyâre pretty stubborn people.”
Former Bernie Sis Shoe0nHead on the hilarity of watching a Biden-Trump election. “Biden’s brain is melting. He doesn’t know where he is half the time, he loses his train of thought, he wanders off camera, and Trump is like a 12 year old on Xbox Live. The combination of these two these two titans coming together will be hilarious! Trump will beat Joe Biden like a pinata, an old, senile pinata, and the DNC will be forced to watch helplessly as their golden goose gets boiled alive right in front of their eyes! Hilarious!”
— Trump War Room – Text TRUMP to 88022 (@TrumpWarRoom) April 16, 2020
More on the theme:
BIDEN: "Um, you know, there's a, uh, during World War II, uh, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, uh, that, uh, you know, was totally different than a- than the- it's called, he called it, the, you know, the World War II, he had the war- the the War Production Board." pic.twitter.com/CwFSW2UITD
Lacking such a ring, Stephen Green tries unsuccessfully to decode from the Bidenese. “When most politicians speak, audiences have to suspend their disbelief. When itâs Biden speaking they have to suspend their incomprehension.”
OC makes this comment and then poof, just like that, Biden calls her up and they are in talks for an endorsement. Itâs almost as if the #metoo movement has been turned into a complete joke, able to be covered up at will via political agreements.
Joe Biden obviously wanted no part of having AOC and her wing propagating the sexual assault claim against him. Heâs succeeded in having outlets like the Times and the Post run interference for him, even trashing Tara Reade along the way, but he has no such control over Bernieâs fanbase. Getting an endorsement from their biggest star gives him that.
I have to give it to her though. AOC is nothing if not cunning. Sheâs managed to go from a nobody freshman congresswoman to the upper echelons of Democratic party influencers in a very short period of time. We can make fun of her all we want, but that takes skill and a lack of shame usually relegated to the Adam Schiffâs of the world.
“Pro-Trump PAC hits âBeijing Biden,â cites China cheerleading.”
Hey, remember that Chinese company Hunter Biden says he’s no longer affiliated with? Well, guess what?
Hunter Biden received wall-to-wall media coverage and praise from his father, former Vice President Joe Biden, in October when he announced he would resign from the board of a Chinese private equity firm by the end of the month.
But six months after Hunter Biden pledged to relinquish his position with BHR Partners, no evidence has surfaced to prove he actually followed through on his promise.
Hunter Bidenâs lawyer, George Mesires, told the Daily Caller News Foundation in early November that his client had resigned from BHRâs board, but he did not provide any evidence of his departure from the Chinese private equity firm at the time.
Chinese business records the DCNF accessed Tuesday still name Hunter Biden as a director of BHR. He also retains a 10% equity stake in BHR through his company, Skaneateles LLC, business records for the Chinese private equity firm show.
Related tweet:
Oh wow. Hunter Biden got the Chinese company to say heâs no longer on the board that seems credible so they just lied on their business filings in March? pic.twitter.com/1TwlzklC09
A global plague has shut down much of American society. The virus is particularly deadly to the elderly, and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will turn 78 later this year. In November, voters will want more than anything a VP who is ready on a momentâs notice to lead the country out of a crisis. So the Democratic veepstakes is suddenly much more important than it otherwise would be.
Joe Biden has pledged to name a woman as his running mate, and he has indicated that he would very much like that woman to be an African American. Stacey Abrams checks both boxes, and she is auditioning for the job. But while she might excite the Democratic base, a failed gubernatorial candidate who has never held a public office more powerful than state legislator obviously has no chance of getting the nod during the present pandemic. Maybe the coronavirus will, against all odds, abate in the coming months. But it would be an act of political insanity for a geriatric presidential nominee to select a former state legislator as his running mate under the current circumstances.
If Biden wants his VP to be a black woman, then, he is left with only one real choice: Kamala Harris. While the California senator has three years of experience as a senator and six years more as her stateâs attorney general, her presidential campaign was a disaster, doomed by vacillation and equivocation on important matters of policy. She proved herself capable of delivering scripted attacks during debates, but her most famous such attack came at Bidenâs expense: She hit him on his past opposition to forced busing, practically calling him a racist. That would be difficult, to say the least, for her to explain away were Biden to choose her. It shouldnât be an insurmountable obstacle, and she still makes sense on paper. But her primary performance failed to generate much enthusiasm among Democrats, and her indecisiveness made her seem unready to step up in a crisis.
What about Elizabeth Warren? If Biden wants ideological balance on the ticket, the senator from Massachusetts makes the most sense. But does he really need ideological balance?
For most of the left, Bidenâs pledges to lower the Medicare-eligibility age to 60, establish a public option for health care, and defeat Donald Trump will be enough. Bernie Sandersâs most alienated, angry, hardcore supporters are not going to turn out because of Warren; they hate her just as much as they hate Biden. The greater number of 2016 Sanders voters who didnât turn out for Hillary Clinton in key Midwestern states could be swayed by Warren, but my hunch is that they were turned off more by Clintonâs persona than her ideology, and itâs hard to see how Warren would connect with them on a cultural level. More importantly, Warrenâs pledges to radically transform the nationâs economy could scare away the moderate suburbanites who powered Democratsâ successful 2018 effort to retake the House â and Biden really canât afford to lose those voters in 2020.
All of which suggests that a relatively moderate woman from the Midwest would make much more sense as Bidenâs VP.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks, but a fair amount of it has been negative. Whitmer only has one year of experience as governor, and voters may come to view Michiganâs especially stringent lockdown restrictions as arbitrary and excessive in the coming months. She seems like a long-shot for the second spot on the national ticket.
The darkhorse VP nominee from the Midwest is Tammy Baldwin, who has been a senator from the potentially decisive, perpetually polarized swing state of Wisconsin for the last seven years, and won re-election in 2018 by eleven points even as GOP governor Scott Walker lost his bid for a fourth term by just one point. The existence of BaldwinâWalker voters, plus the fact that Baldwin was the first openly gay women in Congress, must be attractive to Democrats. The major drawback is that Baldwin has never endured the national spotlight.
That leaves just one name: Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator who is still the leading contender for the job. She wonât scare away crucial suburban voters the way that Warren would and Harris might. She is serving her 14th year in the Senate, so she has experience, and having run for the presidency this cycle, she has survived the scrutiny of a national campaign.
Politico also has a veepstakes roundup. Toward the end we have this from an unnamed Biden adviser: “Anyone who is telling you about whoâs leading in the so-called ‘veepstakes’ is full of shit and doesnât know anything.” Well then, I guess you don’t need to click that link…
"It's apparently a Senate rite of passage that you're not officially sworn in until Delaware Joe has felt up one female member of your immediate family."
There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.
This may be the “costliest government coverup of all time,” one of the sources said.
The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.
The âincreasing confidenceâ comes from classified and open-source documents and evidence, the sources said. Fox News has requested to see the evidence directly.
Promoters of this new line include the Washington Post, which says that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was craptacular:
Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus â even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.
In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become Chinaâs first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassyâs counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.
What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the labâs work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
âDuring interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,â states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassyâs environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)
The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.
As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officialsâ visit, Shiâs team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
There’s that name again.
Jim Geraghty also notes that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not the best:
Two facilities in the city of Wuhan were researching coronaviruses in bats â the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is Chinaâs first biocontainment level-4 facility, inaugurated in 2015. It is still the countryâs only one.
Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers Universityâs Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last month that âbat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.â
Snip.
in February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report suggesting that human errors at these sorts of labs not only had occurred, but occurred unnervingly frequently.
Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities.
Such releases are fairly likely over time, as there are at least 14 labs (mostly in Asia) now carrying out this research. Whatever release probability the world is gambling with, it is clearly far too high a risk to human lives. Mammal-transmissible bird flu research poses a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.
Human error is the main cause of potential exposures of lab workers to pathogens. Statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of, according to my research, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs. These percentages come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Klotz described needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals; pathogens manipulated outside of a biosafety cabinet or other equipment designed to protect exposures to infectious aerosols; failure to follow safety procedures; failure or problems with personal protective equipment; mechanical or equipment failure; and failure to properly inactivate pathogens before transferring them to a lower biosafety level lab for further research. There are plenty of real-life examples for every medical menace in every Robin Cook novel. And this is separate from the other frightening examples of lab accidents laid out last week.
The bat researcher that Xiaoâs report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of ânegligenceâ and the responsible officials had been punished.
“Negligence,” yeah. Funny how China managed to unleash two plagues on the world from its virus research labs through “negligence.” The piece also mentions another Chinese bat researcher:
In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled âYouth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.â Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats. âAmong all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,â he says in Chinese. âYou can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.â He emphasizes, âbats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.â
One of his last statements on the video is: âIn the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.â
The description of Tian Junhuaâs self-isolation came from a May 2017 report by Xinhua News Agency, repeated by the Chinese news site JQKNews.com:
The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.[SIC – LP]
Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.
The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didnât flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.
Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?
Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research âdebunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.â And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.
But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that âa large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.â And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.
The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that China misled the world about the CCP virus and that the World Health Organization should commit to creating a report on the repercussions of its obfuscation.
âChina was not truthful with the world at the outset of this. Had they been more truthful with the world, which would have enabled them to be truthful with themselves, they might have actually been able to contain this entirely and there is some growing evidence to suggest that,â Scott Gottlieb told CBS News in an April 12 interview on âFace the Nation.â
Yes, I’m linking to a Slashdot comment, but one that nicely summarizes all the coronavirus whistleblowers China disappeared, namely:
While Phoenix TV is not wholly owned by the Chinese government, its content is widely considered to be sympathetic to Beijing.
The Hoover Institution regards it as a âquasi-officialâ news outlet with links to the Chinese governmentâs ministry of state security.
Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said in a 2017 report that Phoenix TV is owned by a former Chinese military officer with close ties to Beijing officials.
And a second one. “[Chang Ching-Yi] responded that he was from Taiwan. While that is where he was born, he works for Shanghai Media Group, a company owned by the Chinese regime.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.
Three official news outlets â Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times â have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.
I’m sure those in the media who shrieked about how Russian Facebook ads were destroying democracy will speak up against China any day now… (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)
Indeed, our media can’t seem refrain from disseminating even obvious lies from the Chinese government:
Even before reports on incinerators âworking around the clock,â massive orders for urns, government bribes to keep mourners quiet, and total government censorship, Chinaâs lies were obvious. Even before China concealed the outbreak, blamed the U.S. military, and expelled foreign reporters, their lies were obvious.
Their lies were so obvious because China is an authoritarian regime that history plainly documents killing and starving millions while lying about it to this day. The press should know this, and they do know this, yet still corporate news outlets unquestioningly repeat Beijingâs line.
Then it all got a little confusing Wednesday, when Bloomberg reported both that the United States leads China in coronavirus cases and that China is concealing cases and deaths inside the country.
âChina has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country,â the latter story reads, âunder-reporting both total cases and deaths itâs suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House.â
And there it is. The news certainly checks out with what reporters could have confirmed if theyâd actually been reporting this past month.
Snip.
Bloomberg News, notably, has a history of covering for Beijing and was allowed to keep its reporters in China when government authorities expelled The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in March. Maybe the government was confident those reporters wouldnât start checking in on their numbers, preferring to wait for their U.S. government sources to spoon feed it to them. No surprise. Michael Bloombergâs fortune is deeply entangled with China (and he knows it).
But his company is not alone. CNN uncritically repeats Chinaâs false statistics over and over again. NBC, MSNBC, BBC, The New York Times â the list goes on, all without corrections or updates.
The corporate mediaâs trumpeting of foreign propaganda is especially eager when it hurts the president they donât like. Outlets like Vox and BuzzFeed relentlessly attack Trump for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough early enough, but rushed to edit their past coverage that had authoritatively declared coronavirus less dangerous than the common flu. Vox, The New York Times and their television peers declare the presidentâs use of âWuhan coronavirusâ racist, while editing and forgetting past coverage that used âWuhan coronavirusâ or explained why so many pandemics come from that country.
Speaking of our media, here’s a handy Twitter thread of various MSM outlets parroting the ChiCom line.
Twitter banned, then unbanned, Steve Bannon’s War Room : Pandemic account, without explanation. “Launched in January, Bannon’s podcast covered immense ground concerning the coronavirus – including the theory that the disease leaked from a Chinese laboratory which was experimenting with bat coronavirus; a theory Zero Hedge suggested in January which similarly earned us a permanent ban from Twitter.”
