Bill Maher may be a smarmy liberal, but when he’s right he’s right.
This time he’s calling out the sudden Social Justice Warrior hissy fit over calling it the Wuhan Coronavirus.
“I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear [burkas] was just a different way instead of an abhorrent human rights violation. It’s not racist to point out that eating bats is batshit crazy. In 2007 researchers at the University of Hong Kong wrote the presence of a large reservoir saw of SARS CoV like viruses in horseshoe bats together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China is a time bomb.”
Want to guess how The Daily Beast responded to his point that it wasn’t racist to name a virus after it’s point of origin? That’s right: They called him racist. Social Justice Warriors are as predictable as they are moronic…
America’s mainstream media is lousy even in the best of times.
This is not the best of times.
All the bias, incompetence, mendacity and just plain manifest stupidity of national media has been on even sharper display than usual during the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.
Consider this roundup just a small sampler of the many ways our media has failed to provide accurate, unbiased news during the crisis:
The mainstream media’s routine parroting of propaganda from China’s communist government as it relates to their Wuhan coronavirus cases has been well-documented here at RedState and elsewhere. But what continues to be shocking is how many national news media outlets keep doing so without any trace of shame whatsoever.
Case in point, NBC News, who tweeted out this gem early this morning about the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. in a 24 hour-plus time period in comparison to China in the same timeframe:
U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.
Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5
— NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020
Two things came to mind to me when I read that tweet:
First, it came across as an unnecessary cheap shot “gotcha” similar to how the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to dunk on President Trump by saying his comments about the low unemployment rate during the SOTU “did not age well” in light of the millions of jobs lost in recent weeks.
The second thing was that it sounded like something you’d read on any one of the number of Chinese government-run “media” accounts on Twitter, bragging about how they were doing so much better at combating the virus than the United States.
It’s pretty clear that there is a concerted effort by outlets like CNN to bury their erroneous reporting and downplaying of the Wuhan coronavirus threat by deflecting to Fox News, but the evidence shows CNN was among the worst offenders.
Beyond that, CNN has also been a willing participant in the Chinese government’s propaganda war against the United States, slammed Fox News for covering New York’s response failures – even though CNN’s Jake Tapper covered them the very next day, has purposely and deceptively used the “per capita” label on a selective basis when reporting on US cases in a way that paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, and ran with the absurd “man dies from swallowing fish tank cleaner” story as a way to falsely blame Trump.
The only conclusion to draw from this is that the paper’s report is another example on a long list of them on how the MSM actually seems to be rooting against the use of hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment for suffering Wuhan Coronavirus patients because Orange Man Bad, so much so that they’re willing to deceive their readers as to the nature of Trump’s supposed “financial interest” in it.
Further, this alleged link is that a company that makes a name-brand version is a small percentage of the holdings of a mutual fund President Trump has money in:
Such a garbage take by @nytimes. Here's page from Dodge & Cox Stock Fund most recent annual report, have to dig deep to find Sanofi holding highlighted by NYT, and it's a small percentage of total fund. pic.twitter.com/fzTQZxxi4W
— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) April 7, 2020
By this standard, I evidently have a “financial interest” in every company in the Fortune 500…
There was yet another “sources say” (i.e., #JustTrustMeBro) report that the Pentagon knew about the Wuhan coronavirus in November promoted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (speaking of Democratic Party tools). It took all of twelve hours for the Pentagon to point out that Stephanopoulos was full of shit.
On the mendacity front, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes manages to lie on both sides of the same issue: “Chris Hayes, One Month Ago: Trump ‘Personally Pressured’ Health Officials to ‘Manipulate the Numbers Downward.’ Chris Hayes, Yesterday: Trump Inflated the Death Count So He Could Brag When The Numbers Came In Lower.”
Once again, this is just a small sample of the horrible state of our current media. If I wanted to include every cornavirus screwup, I’d still be writing it…
Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.
Speaking of which…
Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed immunity to it.
The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.
The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.
The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.
At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.
The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.
Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.
I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.
To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.
Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.
Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
“Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.
British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.
In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.
All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.
Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.
The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.
Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.
“‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:
I went to downtown Austin to see if the homeless were practicing social distancing. They weren’t. Also getting more territorial and violent. No law enforcement in sight. pic.twitter.com/zTEJQ3YBiu
Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) announced on Wednesday that he is dropping out of the presidential race.
Sanders said in a speech from his hometown of Burlington that while his campaign had won the “ideological” battle, “the path toward victory [in the primary] is virtually impossible.”
“In state after state…we received a significant majority of the votes” from people under the age of 50, Sanders said. “The future of this country is with our ideas.”
Sanders added, “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible…to exert significant influence over the party platform.”
Sanders has remained in the primary despite multiple sweeping victories by rival Joe Biden. The Vermont senator has won 883 delegates in state primaries to Biden’s 1,196. Biden gained support from moderate and African American voters to pull ahead of Sanders, while Sanders has relied on younger voters as well as broad support among Latinos.
Sanders badly misread the moment following his 2016 defeat, thinking his competitive run meant Democrats were yearning for a socialist true believer dedicated to nationalizing everything. What it actually meant was Democrats were desperately yearning for someone who wasn’t Hillary Clinton. The DNC helped engineer his defeat in 2016 and they did so again this year, though we may have to wait a decade or so for tell-all books to describe exactly how the DNC pressured candidates to exit the race after South Carolina to align so perfectly behind Biden right before Super Tuesday, given his campaign’s near-death experience up until then.
There are tons of Bernie supporters claiming they’ll never vote for Biden ever ever ever, but I suspect most are just Twitter-mad rather than real-life mad. Come October most will have their “Trump just said [same thing Trump has said for five years], and that’s the last straw! I’m voting for Biden!” moment. In theory, some should vote for whoever the Green Party candidate is, which seems likely to be co-founder Howie Hawkins, who is also running as the Socialist Party USA candidate. You would think that watermelon green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside flavor would be perfect for Bernie supporters, but a lot of the 2016 Green and Libertarian Party vote totals were based on how odious Hillary Clinton was. Ditto probable Libertarian candidate Jacob Hornberger, who seems to be holding off the juggernaut that is Vermin Supreme but is unlikely to reach Gary Johnson’s 4 million plus votes in the general election.
This is clearly Bernie’s last Presidential hurrah, and the hard left will need to pick a new champion for their 2024 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be constitutionally eligible then, but don’t discount the possibility of a celebrity outsider campaign.
So it’s Biden vs. Trump. Polls show big leads for Biden, but that’s due to The Current Unpleasantness. How quickly does the economy recover, and how long can Democrats hide Biden’s obvious cognitive decline from the American public?
Does this mean an end to the Clown Car update? You’ll have to tune in Monday to find out…
The frozen campaign continues. Slow Joe racks up Pinocchios and launches a podcast, the Democratic Convention has been moved back a month (and may turn into a virtual-only affair), and Bernie’s doppelganger says it’s time to throw in the towel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Wisconsin may or may not have a primary tomorrow. It’s theoretically going ahead but there seem to be numerous legal challenges due to the difficulty of holding it due to the Wuhan coronavirus.
Polls
Yet again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
Joe Rogan says he’d rather vote for President Donald Trump than Joe Biden. “I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden]. I don’t think he can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office.” (It’s an interesting interview, but then I get to the part where his guest talks about a friend’s self-trepanation and go “Well, this is a little far afield of fodder for a political blog…”)
Democrats have postponed the start of their convention from July 13 to August 17.
From the nuts and bolts of campaigning (fundraising, door-knocking, holding rallies) to the most basic assumptions about the economy and how the public sees Trump, nearly everything needs to be reassessed. Biden’s Philadelphia headquarters has been cleared out. “Everybody’s working remotely across the whole campaign,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director. “We’re all discovering the joys of a Zoom conference call.”…
The presumed date by which Biden’s delegate nerds predicted Bernie Sanders would be unofficially knocked out of the race has been upended by a series of canceled primaries. Biden had planned to use a predicted victory in Georgia on Tuesday to essentially end the race by declaring that he had achieved “an insurmountable delegate lead.”
Instead, the Georgia primary was moved to May and Biden retreated to a makeshift studio in his basement at home in Delaware to broadcast Zoom videos that have had to compete — poorly, so far — with briefings from elected officials like Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who are actually responsible for dealing with the crisis.
“Everything that’s happening right now is like nothing I’ve experienced in previous presidential campaigns,” said Dunn.
The first big political issue is whether the Sanders campaign has any chance of returning from the dead. With many remaining primaries getting kicked to May and June, Biden might not be able to deliver his “insurmountable delegate lead” line until the summer. And while the pandemic has essentially erased Sanders from the news, there is an undercurrent of frustration — and a little nervousness — among some Biden aides that he has been robbed of a clean victory as the presumptive nominee at the end of March, as they had assumed he would. “There’s no closure,” said a top Biden adviser.
The pandemic exploded and inserted itself as the only issue that matters just as Biden made his remarkable transition from lost cause to incredible comeback. The rebound was so swift and his dominance over the race so sudden, that a lot of Biden advisers and outside allies are still processing what happened. Did Biden build an excellent team that just took some time to get things right? Or was Biden’s team hapless and he was simply the beneficiary of underlying dynamics in the primary that allowed him to beat Sanders?
The latter view was expressed by an informal adviser to the campaign.
“After Super Tuesday, Biden got catapulted to the front of the line in spite of himself and his campaign,” he said. “The classic example of that obviously is Massachusetts, where he never went there, didn’t spend any money, didn’t have any people on the ground, and he beat Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It’s extraordinary. And there’s a reason for it: Democratic voters were saying that the most important thing to them is to beat Trump and he was happy to be the beneficiary of that. But perhaps many of us were overly critical of how they ran the campaign and, frankly, how he performed. He has some fundamental strengths that those of us watching this undervalued.”
When Biden has been heard from, he has looked frankly pathetic. After disappearing for more than a week after his primary victories in Missouri, Michigan and Washington, Biden emerged this week for a series of speeches and interviews from his Wilmington, Del., home.
The purpose was obvious — his campaign desperately needs to muscle its way back into the news cycle. But that turned out to be easier said than done…Biden is clearly not working for the Biden campaign.
Gates is a Republican and is certainly no liberal, but his reputation for moderation, pragmatism, and managerial talent was such that Barack Obama wanted to retain him for a long stint as secretary of defense. It wasn’t the easiest of tenures, but for two and a half years, Gates worked diligently and as smoothly as he could with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the Obama-Biden national security team.
It is therefore a matter of grave alarm—at least a DEFCON 2 and possibly DEFCON 1, the ultimate state of alert—when Gates, that most centered of centrists, asserts that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue for the past four decades.”
The entire syllabus of Biden’s foreign policy and national security errors is a target-rich environment for the many American Greatness writers with expertise on particular issues. Anyone who makes the case for Biden’s election to the presidency should be made to defend the extremism and demonstrated failure of Biden’s national security record.
The former VP doesn’t just stick to marginal lies or spin either, he goes directly at major issues knowing that he’ll be shown to be fibbing.
But does he know? That’s a real question when you’ve got a guy who’s clearly losing his mental faculties. As I’ve documented here, here, and here (among many others), Biden’s inability to process his thoughts and his constant “gaffes” are apparent at this point. There have also been bouts of anger on the campaign trail in which he’s berated or even physically accosted Democrat primary voters.
These are the kinds of things someone wouldn’t do if they had the ability to understand what they were doing. Trump may be a brute at times, but you’ll never find him jabbing his finger in a voter’s chest and yelling at them.
All of these things raise serious questions about just how stable Biden is. If you’ve watched him lately, he looks like he’s about to fall over while just trying to do remote TV hits. This is not a guy who looks — or acts — like he’s all there. So while the constant lies are worthy of coverage — and every single one needs to be slammed — the reality of his condition may be much more serious than just a case of being a politician.
If I’m following Joe Biden correctly during this ABC interview, he still wants the Wisconsin primary to proceed this week during a stay-at-home order amid a pandemic, but says out of caution that the DNC Convention should not be held in Wisconsin 3-4 months from now. Check.
Did you know that Joe Biden has a podcast? Speaking of which: “Biden’s New Podcast Available Exclusively On Vinyl.” “Joe Biden did a town hall about coronavirus last night [March 27] on CNN, and I don’t think there is a single news article about it other than on CNN itself, which doesn’t seem to have a transcript.” Biden is running ahead of where Hillary Clinton did against Sanders four years ago. “Biden held onto much of the turf that Clinton won in 2016, but he also captured a lot of territory that Sanders carried four years ago. We found that much of Biden’s success can be explained by his dominance in areas with larger shares of white voters without a college degree.” Time’s Up: We’re here to fight for all women who make accusations of sexual assault. Well, except those against Joe Biden. For Reasons. Related:
It’s kind of strange that after Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault, his Senior Adviser, @SymoneDSanders went through and deleted all of her Tweets about Kavanaugh.
Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Yet many Democrats have ‘buyers’ remorse’ as the COVID virus has driven Biden off centerstage and into a hastily-built basement studio in his Delaware home.
Biden has tried to remain relevant to the public through TV broadcasts, but those appearances have been gaffe-prone and interspersed with lapses in lucidity. Last Friday, he announced on CNN that ‘I speak to all five of my grandkids,’ which must make his very much alive sixth grandchild feel a little neglected. Dave Catanese of McClatchy found his interview last Monday painful to watch: ‘Joe Biden struggled mightily at the top of his MSNBC interview where he looked to be reading from notes to answer a question.’
Democrats openly worry about the lack of enthusiasm for Biden. A new Washington Post/ABC poll found 86 percent of Trump supporters enthusiastic about their choice. Only 74 percent of Biden backers said the same thing. Most ominously, the poll found that 15 percent of Democrats who still back Bernie Sanders say they’d vote for Trump, not Biden, in November. That’s more than the 12 percent of Sanders voters who plumped for Trump in 2016.
The knife-in-the-back anonymous-top-aides-say-he-should-consider-dropping-out stage is already in full swing. Of course, it’s from the Washington Post and contains the magic “just trust me bro” phrase (“according to two people with knowledge of the situation,”) so who knows if it’s real or just more DNC rat-farking. His Saturday Night Live doppelganger Larry David says Sanders should drop out and everybody should back Biden.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.
At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.
If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.
Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.
Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….
If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.
President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.
Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.
More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
“Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”
As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.
Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.
Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.
With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.
Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?
Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Here’s a double-shot of Tucker Carlson on two different lies being bandied about but our media (and parts of our various governments) on effective tools to fight the Wuhan coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine given in combination with antibiotics looks like an effective combination. So why do so many Democrats insist it doesn’t work, going so far that a douple of Democratic governor’s have tried to ban it’s use for treating coronavirus? “If Trump is for it, they’re against it, even if it might save American lives.”
The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
*Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?
Polls
Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.
“13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.
As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.
The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.
For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.
Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.
Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.
Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.
Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):
Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:
When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.
“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.
As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.
Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.
No, not that one.
It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.
What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:
For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.
Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.
“President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”
Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.
Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.
But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.
As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.
The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.
Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.
Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.
Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.
In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.
“I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”
Here’s an excerpt:
What is Joe Biden doing with his hand here?
It looks like Biden’s teleprompter went down during his coronavirus press briefing today, and his staff forgot to put a copy of his speech at the podium. pic.twitter.com/YVBz1QJK2R
— Francis Brennan (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@FrancisBrennan) March 23, 2020
Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:
Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.
If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.
Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.
He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.
Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:
Ugh…..I feel so so bad for Biden. I know most of y'all don't want to hear that, but I do. This is just an awful thing to watch and it's only going to get worse and @TheDemocrats should have known better. https://t.co/KT6rLCbb7E
Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:
Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.
Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”
Snip.
Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”
Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”
Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:
Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.
Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.
Moreover, Cuomo’s various upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?
James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.
“We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”
Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.
“But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”
“Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.
The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.
“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.
And far from perfect means it was stuffed with egregious special interest pork. Pelosi, of course, tried to block it because it just didn’t have nearly as much special interest pork as she would like.
Nevada’s governor has signed an emergency order barring the use of anti-malaria drugs for someone who has the coronavirus.
Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak’s order Tuesday restricting chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine comes after President Donald Trump touted the medication as a treatment for the virus.
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
Snip.
January 15: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
The Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Sounds unbelievable?
A new report from Horizon Advisory consultants details Beijing’s post-virus strategy—already operational—to leverage the pandemic to seize global market share in key industries, further global dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reverse efforts in the United States and elsewhere to decouple from the People’s Republic.
“Beijing intends to use the global dislocation and downturn to attract foreign investment, to seize strategic market share and resources—especially those that force dependence, and to proliferate global information systems; to as Chinese sources put it, ‘leap-frog’ industrially, ‘overtake around the corner’ strategically, capture the ‘commanding heights’ globally. Beijing intends to reverse recent U.S. efforts to counteract China’s subversive international presence; at the same time to chip away at U.S.-Europe relations. In other words, Beijing will use COVID-19 to accelerate its long-standing, strategic offensive,” the Horizon report states.
We’re witnessing Beijing’s attempt to scrub its culpability for the pandemic from the world’s memory. Chinese Communist propagandists declare, “China is owed a thank you for buying the world time” and the New York Times dutifully repeats it.
After covering up the novel infection and unleashing it on the world, Beijing’s rulers bought up the world’s supply of protective gear and respirators.
Then they sell these critical goods to Italy while portraying themselves as the heroic humanitarian savior of the world, not unlike a pyromaniac who takes credit for calling the fire department.
To the degree that we are suffering death and economic hurt from COVID-19, we can also attribute the toll to the Chinese Communist Party. Had it just called in the international medical community in late November, instituted early quarantines, and allowed its own citizens to use email and social media to apprise and warn others of the new disease, then the world and the U.S. would probably not have found themselves in the current panic. The reasons China did not act more responsibly may be inherent in communist governments, or they may involve more Byzantine causes left to be disclosed.
Add in the proximity of a Level 4 virology lab nearby Ground Zero of COVID-19, which fueled Internet conspiracy theories; the weird rumors about quite strange animals such as snakes and pangolins birthing the infection in primeval open meat markets stocked with live animals in filthy conditions in cages; and pirated videos of supposed patients dropping comatose in crowded hospital hallways. With all of that, we had the ingredients of a Hollywood zombie movie, adding to the frenzy.
Plus, 2020 is an election year — echoing how the 1976 swine flu was politicized. The Left and its media appendages saw COVID-19 as able to do what John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, the Mueller team, and impeachment could not: destroy the hated Trump presidency.
China will rue what it begat.
That is, it will come to appreciate fully that the supposed efficiency, ruthlessness, and autocracy of the Communist Party — what had so impressed foolish American journalists who once marveled at Beijing’s ability to enact by fiat liberal pet projects such as high-speed rail and solar industries — were China’s worst enemies, ensuring that the virus would spread and that China’s international reputation would be ruined.
It is only since the outbreak of the pandemic that Americans have come to learn that China is the major supplier for U.S. medicines. The first drug shortages, due to dependence on China, have already occurred. Eighty percent of America’s “active pharmaceutical ingredients” comes from abroad, primarily from China (and India); 45% of the penicillin used in the country is Chinese-made; as is nearly 100% of the ibuprofen. Rosemary Gibson, author of “China Rx,” testified last year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission about this critical dependence, but nothing has changed in this most vital of supply chains.
The medicine story is repeated throughout the U.S. economy and the world. The unparalleled economic growth of China over the past generation has hollowed out domestic industries around the globe and also prevented other nations, such as Vietnam, from moving up the value-added chain. Many industries are quite frankly stuck with Chinese companies as their only or primary suppliers. Thus, the costs of finding producers other than China, what is known as “decoupling,” are exorbitant, and few countries currently can replicate China’s infrastructure and workforce.
The world never should have been put at risk by the coronavirus. Equally, it never should have let itself become so economically dependent on China. The uniqueness of the coronavirus epidemic is to bring the two seemingly separate issues together. That is why Beijing is desperate to evade blame, not merely for its initial incompetence, but because the costs of the system it has built since 1980 are now coming into long-delayed focus. Coronavirus is a diabolus ex machina that threatens the bases of China’s modern interaction with foreign nations, from tourism to trade, and from cultural exchange to scientific collaboration.
Xi can best avoid this fate by adopting the very transparency that he and the party have assiduously avoided. Yet openness is a mortal threat to the continued rule of the CCP. The virus thus exposes the CCP’s mortal paradox, one which shows the paralysis at the heart of modern China. For this reason alone, the world’s dependence on China should be responsibly reduced.
ere are some people who are useless, especially now: Performance artists, diversity consultants, magic crystal healers, sociology TAs, members of the mainstream media, and gender-unspecified entities who brew kale kombucha.
Here are some people who matter, especially now: Soldiers, nurses, truckers, cops, the guy who stocks the shelves at Ralphs, farmers, and that dude rebuilding your roof.
The Chinese Bat Soup Flu has certainly clarified some of the blurred lines between what is important and what is frivolous garbage. Yet, in a time when millions of Americans are at risk of dying as a direct result of ChiCom conspiracies and the bizarre need of its serfs to eat any weird thing that crawls or slithers within reach of their chopsticks, our useless elite is fixated on making sure we don’t hurt the feelz of the very people who stuck us in this predicament.
Our elite is full of self-important morons who contribute nothing but more dumb in a time when the only thing we have a surplus of is dumb. The real hero is the guy who trucks in a load of whole wheat bread, ribeyes, and low-priced cabernet to the Trader Joe’s, not the Prius-piloting sissy with a Maddow fetish who shops there. The people our elite laughed at, scoffed at, poked at, are the very people who are going to rescue us from the mess that same elite helped make.
Hmm: “Fun facts about Covid Act Now, the org that is mobilizing press, politicians, & citizens to rally behind mass quarantine/lockdown: 1) They were founded by Dem activists. 1 of them, Igor Kofman, works full time to defeat Trump in 2020. Another is a Dem legislator.”
Ferguson’s model projected 2.2 million dead people in the United States and 500,000 in the U.K. from COVID-19 if no action were taken to slow the virus and blunt its curve. The model predicted far fewer deaths if lockdown measures — measures such as those taken by the British and American governments — were undertaken.
After just one day of ordered lockdowns in the U.K., Ferguson is presenting drastically downgraded estimates, crediting lockdown measures, but also revealing that far more people likely have the virus than his team figured.
“After the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”
That’s right, the shortage of N95 masks can be traced back to the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic of 2009… when Barack Obama was president.
A different story from the Los Angeles Times published last week goes into more detail about what happened after the swine flu pandemic depleted the supply. According to their story, “After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks […] be replenished by the stockpile.” The problem is that didn’t happen. According to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Association, about 100 million N95 respirator masks were used up during the swine flu pandemic of 2009-2010, but, he said was unaware of any “major effort to restore the stockpile to cover that drawdown.”
A place that once gave Democratic native sons Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale 4-1 voting wins and considers the late Sen. Paul Wellstone a local hero has begun to embrace a president who bears little resemblance to them, except that he reversed the “injustice” of an Obama-era order that would have brought the nickel-copper project to a 20-year standstill. On top of that were the 25 percent tariffs Trump imposed on most foreign steel, which provided an initial boost to the 5,000 miners still employed in the region’s numerous iron-ore mines that have served as the backbone to the region’s economy.
All of that put Ely in the middle of a political transformation that makes Minnesota the president’s top target among states he lost in 2016 — and potentially a pivot point in the 2020 presidential race. Trump lost the state by 45,000 votes in 2016, a remarkable feat considering how entrenched Democrats have been in the state.
Remember Hershel “Woody” Williams, the Medal of Honor winner I highlighted last Veterans Day? The Navy just commissioned a ship named after him. “The Medal of Honor presented to Williams by President Harry S. Truman two months after the end of World War II is now enshrined in the galley of the ship named in his honor…The Williams, built at a cost of about $500 million, is the second of three Expeditionary Sea Base ships.” ESB ships are interesting multi-use ships built on oil tanker hulls:
The ESD and ESB ships were originally called the Mobile Landing Platform (MLP) and the MLP Afloat Forward Staging Base (AFSB), respectively. In September 2015, the Secretary of the Navy re-designated these hulls to conform to traditional three-letter ship designations.
The design of these ships is based on the Alaska class crude oil carrier, which was built by General Dynamics National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO). Leveraging commercial designs ensures design stability and lower development costs
The USNS Montford Point (T-ESD 1) and USNS John Glenn (T-ESD 2) are configured with the Core Capability Set (CCS), which consists of a vehicle staging area, vehicle transfer ramp, large mooring fenders and up to three Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) vessel lanes to support its core equipment transfer requirements. With a 9,500 nautical mile range at a sustained speed of 15 knots, these approximately 80,000 tons, 785-foot ships leverage float-on/float-off technology and a reconfigurable mission deck to maximize capability. Additionally, the ships’ size allows for 25,000 square feet of vehicle and equipment stowage space and 380,000 gallons of JP-5 fuel storage.
USS Lewis B. Puller (ESB 3), the first ESB delivered, along with follow ships Hershel “Woody” Williams (ESB 4) and Miguel Keith (ESB 5), are being optimized to support a variety of maritime based missions including Special Operations Force (SOF) and Airborne Mine Counter Measures (AMCM). The ESBs include a four spot flight deck, mission deck and hangar, are designed around four core capabilities: aviation facilities, berthing, equipment staging support, and command and control assets.
I would think this little tidbit would get more play, since the media repeatedly assured us that Wokescold Moppet was The Most Important Person In The World.
Still more efficient and straightforward than ObamaCare:
Thanks everybody for their entries and nominations…..but there’s one clear winner of the internet today…..round of applause please people…#WINternetpic.twitter.com/ToNA7bitpQ
You might think, what with the Wuhan coronavirus crisis and all, that Senate Democratic Minority leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might set aside partisan differences and get together with Republicans on a bill to save the jobs of American workers.
Former Navy SEAL Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) is calling on Americans to hold the Democrats “accountable” for having “torpedoed” a bipartisan COVID-19 emergency bill that provides funds to small businesses to help cover payroll and rent and other coronavirus-related expenses, expands unemployment benefits, and quickly puts cash in struggling Americans’ pockets.
The real reason House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intervened in the eleventh hour to derail the Senate’s emergency bill, Crenshaw suggested, was to push her own bill containing a series of non-crisis-related Democratic wishlist items, included some Green New Deal policies and collective bargaining powers for unions. The political stunt, he said, will not be forgotten.
“Democrats torpedoed a bipartisan emergency bill that: -Provides payroll & rent for small business -Credit to businesses across America to keep them afloat – Cash in American’s pockets – unemployment benefits,” the popular Texas Republican wrote in the first of a series of tweets starting Sunday (posts below). “They have no good reasons. Just partisanship. Call your reps NOW.”
“Do Dems want a recession? A depression? How can they justify this?” he asked in a follow-up post. “This bill is critical for the livelihood of millions. Our country will be devastated without immediate help. Dems can lie all they want about ‘helping workers’ but now they are destroying their lives.”
“I am not one to make hyperbolic statements,” Crenshaw wrote in another post. “But what Senate Democrats have done is truly awful. This bill was negotiated in good faith. Been monitoring its progress all week. It can save our economy. And they killed it. Out of spite and bitterness. Hold Dems accountable.”
“We will not forget this,” Crenshaw wrote in response to a tweet by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blaming the decision to block the bill on its supposed inadequate “protections.” “More businesses are closing tomorrow while you peddle this lie. You literally stopped a good bill because it *didn’t have enough red tape*. You hate American businesses so much that you would sacrifice our economy out of pure contempt.”
Brietbart has more examples of the pork, including automatic extensions for non-immigrant visa holders and money for Planned Parenthood.
A lot of justified outrage on Twitter:
EVERYONE in America, Democrat and Republican, MUST read this thread. This is what Pelosi killed the rescue package for. “Corporate diversity requirement,” “Airline carbon emissions,” and the list goes on.
I mean. Again. Worthy goal? Perhaps. We can debate it. But why are we establishing all these new programs when what we really need is to PASS A BILL TO HELP PEOPLE WHO CANNOT WORK. pic.twitter.com/Awv3Thjc8h
Annnnd….in case you thought we were done with the woke-scolding, you were wrong.
Families can't pay their mortgages and there aren't enough ventilators, but you know what we will have? Corporate budgets dedicated to diversity & inclusion initiatives! pic.twitter.com/tBuO3hrBfB
We can agree or disagree about the value of collective bargaining for federal employees but can we all agree that it doesn't belong in a relief bill DESIGNED TO HELP PEOPLE WITH #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/bswhj4dMeG
Markets sell off, again, so that Pelosi can write a bill demanding corporate diversity, federal bargaining rights, $15 an hour min wage, airline emissions offsets, and same-day voting. Just the sort of "leader" you want in a crisis. America deserves better.
Democrats' behavior is a national disgrace. They are blocking aid for sick people and unemployed workers over Pelosi's 𝒕𝒐𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚 𝒖𝒏𝒓𝒆𝒍𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 demands: • Limits on ICE and Border Patrol • Regulations from Green New Deal • Disclosures for “corporate board diversity”
Pelosi and Schumer are demanding airline fuel emissions, wind and solar tax credits, and increased collective bargaining power for unions in the pandemic relief package. They are holding up checks to Americans to please their donors.
I repeat: it is NOT A BAILOUT to float zero-interest loans to companies affected by the government-imposed lockdown. This would like arguing it is a giveaway for me to compensate you after I drive my car through your living room.
I’m working to help Texans get the help they need – Democrats are playing partisan games. This is disgraceful and irresponsible, countless jobs are on the line and people’s lives are at stake. We need to act fast. pic.twitter.com/EXV5iDYAye
"Here it is again in a bill designed to stop the pandemic. Are you kidding me? $15-an-hour minimum wage. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are learning that the true minimum wage is zero when you lose your job." pic.twitter.com/Cv01SeNEnT
This is some truly shameful shit. People are suffering and Nancy Pelosi is doing the most grotesquely imaginable shopping list of psychopathic progressive demands. https://t.co/bSadvZqmJx
I have never voted for someone who was not a democrat in my life. That streak will end in November.
I'm beyond angry about what they are doing. This is not about the well-being of workers. This is taking advantage of a crisis. It's unconscionable. I can't wait for them to lose. https://t.co/JZhJYFlTKN
If you watch one thing on Dems blocking coronavirus relief, make it this. The American people are losing their jobs left and right and Pelosi is holding them hostage with partisan demands.
Democrats are demanding that we fully implement every progressive pipe dream ever or they’re going to tank the economy and let millions of Americans lose their jobs over spite at not being able to wet their beaks.
