At least one big-city mayor is now calling on the federal government to investigate what appears to be an “organized” effort to foment unrest and engage in rioting, as security experts in other cities discover evidence that many of the weekend’s violent incidents may have been pre-planned and coordinated.
In Chicago, mayor Lori Lightfoot told media Sunday that she believes there is “strong evidence” of an organized effort to use the weekend’s anti-police brutality protests as a cover for violence, Crain’s Chicago Business reports, and said the city is speaking with at least three Federal agencies about a possible joint investigation.
Snip.
“There is no doubt. This was an organized effort last night,” Lightfoot said in a weekend press conference, referring to Friday’s unrest. “There were clearly efforts to subvert the peaceful process and make it into something violent.”
Minneapolis and urban centers across America are burning, most directly in response to the brutal killing of a black man by a white Minnesota police officer. But the rage ignited by the death of George Floyd is symptomatic of a profound sense of alienation that has been building for years among millions of poor, working class urbanites. The already diminished prospects facing such people have only been worsened by the unforeseen onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies devised to combat it.
Like earlier pandemics, the virus has devastated poorer communities, where people live in the most crowded housing, are forced to travel on public transport, and work in the most exposed “essential” jobs, most of which are badly paid. Unlike the affluent of Gotham, some 30 percent of whom were able to leave town and work remotely, the working class remained, forced to endure crowded conditions as the disease raged through the city. No surprise then that inhabitants of the impoverished Bronx have suffered nearly twice as many deaths from COVID-19 as those in the more affluent, but denser borough of Manhattan.
This pattern can be observed globally. In Spain, the bulk of infections and reduced incomes are concentrated in poorer areas. Similar disparities can be found in countries as varied as China, Japan, France, and Italy. Even in egalitarian Singapore, infections have risen precipitously among the country’s migrant workers—an underclass who tend to live in crowded dormitories. Similarly, in Los Angeles the poor have died from COVID-19 at four times the rate of the city’s overall population. In both New Orleans and Detroit, the vast majority of fatalities have been among disproportionately impoverished African Americans.
As if this were not already quite bad enough, we are now starting to see the economic consequences of the lockdowns. In the US, roughly half of all job losses in April were in low-paying fields such as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks; in contrast information and finance jobs were barely touched. Almost 40 percent of those Americans making under $40,000 a year have lost their jobs as the wage gains made during the first two years of the Trump administration largely evaporated.
Snip.
Perhaps the most alarming development during these riots has been the urgent revival of what urban historian Fred Siegel calls “the riot ideology.” The roots of this thinking can be traced to the late-1960s when they were set down among progressive analysts who decided that violence and looting constituted a just response to abuses by law enforcement and other agents of oppression. This notion became painfully popular during the 1992 LA riots, which I covered as a journalist, when random looting and even killings were applauded by some radical activists as part of a glorious “rebellion” or uprising.
Today, two generations later, this ideology is staging a comeback. Progressive outlets like Vox scold anyone who refers to outbreaks of widespread mayhem and looting as “riots” preferring to describe them as righteous protests; Mother Jones says that anyone using the word “riot” to describe violent looters is intrinsically racist. Writers at the New York Times have even proposed “de-funding” police forces in favor of spreading more money to other government programs. Slate, for its part, endorsed the burning of the Minneapolis police station as “a reasonable reaction” to George Floyd’s death, and suggested that such wanton destruction is a “quintessentially American response, and a predictable one” comparable to the Boston Tea Party and Stonewall.
National Democratic leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, have been strangely reluctant to denounce the violence, while correctly criticizing President Trump for his needlessly inflammatory tweets. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has quoted Martin Luther King’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard” and stripped it of its original context to decorate the current violence with the romanticism of justice. Radical Minneapolis firebrand Rep. Ilhan Omar has suggested that her constituents are “terrorized” by the presence of the police and National Guard.
Deep blue Mayors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a 38-year-old progressive focused heavily on racial injustice, cede the streets to the most violent elements, even abandoning a police station that was set alight—a response former St. Paul Mayor and Senator Norm Coleman called “stunning.” Rather than contain demonstrations, some cities initially conceded critical urban space to the rioters to the point of threatening prime central city real estate. In Chicago, city officials, much like their Medieval counterparts, raised the bridges over the Chicago River to keep the protestors out of affluent parts of the central city.
Remarkably, these mayors seem to be largely indifferent to the rise of largely white, anarchist groups, like Antifa, who can be seen in videos committing acts of vandalism and violence, even over the objections of African American protestors.
— Big League Politics (@bigleaguepol) June 2, 2020
Enough is enough:
These riots stopped being about #GeorgeFloyd a long time ago. Enough is enough. I’m fed up watching us destroy ourselves. It’s time for me to speak. pic.twitter.com/gWAa15tGd8
Antifa is a despicable group whose sole mission is to terrorize this country and its citizens. It deserves to be categorized – and punished – accordingly.
As Antifa showed this weekend, it is a domestic terrorist organization. Period.
— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) June 1, 2020
This one is everywhere:
Valuable life lesson: a mob is never on your side.
Patrick Underwood, the federal protective officer killed in Oakland, was black. So, just as in the 1960s, we have black law enforcement officials being killed by white radicals.
The playbook has been the same one they ran in Fergeson: use the cover of black protestors to bring far-left agitators out to sow disorder and chaos through rioting, looting and arson, while the response to the disorder in (mostly) Democratic Party run locales is ineffectual. That playbook appeared to be aimed at radicalizing black voters so they continued to show up at polls for Democrats without Obama at the top of the ticket. Not only did it fail to do that, the actual voting results seemed counterproductive; Romney won Missouri by about 250,000 votes in 2012, but Trump won it by over 500,000 votes in 2016. Given that, why are George Soros and other financial backers of Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter running the same playbook again in multiple communities around the country?
Here are some possible answers, come complimentary, some contradictory.
With lockdowns ending across so much of the nation, never again would so many people be idle and/or unemployed all at once. Never again would antifa have a chance to wreck so much havoc on so wide a scale. It was now or never.
The radical left always thinks it’s more popular than it actually is, and it actually thought it could topple the U.S. government with violent insurrection.
At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa have partnered with them, for now, to help accelerate the break down of society.
The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.
The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic.
The old communist adage that “Reform is the enemy of revolution.” With the pre-cornoavirus economy going gangbusters, the hard left had to do something radical to prevent prosperity from spreading among the black community. So when they torch a bar that a black firefighter built with his life savings, that’s not a lamentable side effect, that’s a direct desired result to punish him for participating in capitalism.
What the left really wants is a chance to insert direct Social Justice Warrior control into the nation’s police departments.
Maybe it was a lure to bait police into overreacting to create another round of martyrs to further radicalize blacks.
The Wuhan coronavirus lockdown wasn’t moving Trump’s poll numbers at all, so more drastic actions were needed.
The aftermath of ObamaGate is going to be bad for the Democratic Party, and they needed a distraction.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.” Maybe they saw it as a chance to transfer more power and control to government now that it’s lockdown powers were dwindling.
Here’s a radical thought: What if the backers and antifa and #BlackLivesMatter want Trump to win? The insane wing couldn’t get Bernie Sanders the nomination, and they can’t control the Democratic Party if Biden wins and leaves the Clinton hacks in charge of the gravy train for the next 4-8 years. As in the 1960s, looting and rioting boost the chances of law and order candidates, which is clearly Donald Trump this year. They need Trump to win again to completely take over the Party for the radical left.
Some random tweets about the rioting:
If only there were some simple way to avoid such a fate.
But watch out if more than 50 people show up at a church this morning. Madison officials are threatening action against the churches. Sad. Now, more than ever, people need to gather together to worship and heal. https://t.co/0RD5anhsJG
Fed LE is not under the control of leftist DAs, police chiefs & mayors. For too long you had Democrat cities pulling back police & releasing rioters immediately w/o serious charges.
By reviewing arrest records, the FBI can determine potential candidates for federal charges. 2/
When the first of these little trust fund sissies figures out he’s not walking out of his cell after 20 minutes with a $50 fine but looking at five years in Leavenworth on a Fed rap, he’ll squeal on his comrades. 4/
This is an opportunity to destroy Antifa root and branch, and to eliminate the armed wing of the Democrat party. Forever
They miscalculated and overstepped – America is absolutely against them and this is the time for @realDonaldTrump to strike a fatal blow against them. 5/
I sure telling ordinary Americans that they "don't get to complain about looting" is a surefire vote winner for November. #BlackLivesMatter and #antifa have done more to ensure Trump's reelection than anyone else.
Uncle Hugo's Bookstore engulfed. I went to this place a couple times and the owner was kind and made good recommendations. RIP. ☹️ pic.twitter.com/OrHJNG5g1w
In Atlanta, the CNN building was heavily vandalized. Other businesses were vandalized and looted, police cars were set on fire and the College Football Hall of Fame looted. Rapper Killer Mike has some thoughts:
Killer Mike confronts CNN for stoking the fire that led to their Atlanta HQ being invaded and trashed:
Fires have been started in the street in downtown Portland. This is a repeat of the antifa riots after Trump won election in 2016. #BlackLivesMatter#antifa#GeorgeFloyd
Dallas wasn’t spared, with downtown and the club-filled Deep Ellum area attacked, at least one police car burned.
In Houston, damage appeared to be less severe, possibly because 200 people were arrested for trying to block a roadway. Some broken glass, but I’m not seeing reports of arson. As always, judiciously applied lawful force tends to nip rioting in the bud.
Don’t believe for a second the laughable “white supremacists did this” talking point the left is trying to foist on the public:
I went thru the Hennepin Sheriff arrest log. Of the 25 arrested for rioting, only 3 were out of state. None of those 3 had supremacy leanings on social media. All hated Trump. One was a Bernie supporter. One posted on FB of going out to protest.
Some of these narratives right now being spouted by major media personalities are bananas. I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility some kind of White Supremacist agitators at the riots. But you have to be willfully blind to pretend Antifa's not there and causing problems.
The question remains: What do hard-left and antifa/#BlackLivesMatters backers like George Soros hope to gain through backing such riots?
🚨🚨 There's only one reason there's protests at the Whitehouse tonight & other cities in America & it has nothing to do with George Floyd or the #Minneapolisprotests. It's because George Soros paid & sent them there. Retweet if you agree this is an old story. INVESTIGATE THAT pic.twitter.com/Hkfw948DwA
It seems that every four years the leftwing media complex manufactures another race riot. Who benefits? Do they think they can prevent an erosion of black voters to Trump by playing the “Racist cops!” card from now until election day? That backfired spectacularly in 2016. Minnesota went narrowly to Hillary Clinton in 2016; did they just ensure that it will now flip to Trump? Is that the preferred outcome, so the insane wing can seize control of the Democratic Party from the corrupt wing?
What? “A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year.” I don’t think anyone had that on their bingo card.
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.
The CDC does caution that the numbers are likely to change with new data, but considering we’ve gone from 3.4 percent to 2.0 percent to now 0.26 percent. The more data we get, the lower the numbers get. So, I’m thinking it might get even lower.
But, the bigger takeaway from this is that the early doomsday predictions about the coronavirus were all wrong. Everything that justified the lockdowns and the shutting down of our economy was wrong. We need to open this country back up.
There appears to be no statistical connection between the economic pain of the nationwide shutdowns and the number of COVID-19 cases or fatalities. None. Let that sink in for a moment, given we were told we had to lock down America to “flatten the curve” and save lives.
On the other hand, the data does suggest that reliance on mass transit is connected with virus cases and fatalities.
Snip.
There appears to be no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and pandemic policies that forced nearly 40 million people into the unemployment lines. None.
One might expect to see that states that suffered the most in COVID cases or fatalities would also be the states with the highest increases in unemployment as politicians and public health officials in those areas instituted strict measures to slow the disease. Alternatively, states that hadn’t seen much in the way of the virus should be relatively better off economically.
Among the 15 most-populous states, New York has the highest COVID case rate, the highest death rate, and the highest age-adjusted death rate, while its unemployment rate jumped 10.8 percent from February to April.
At the other end of the spectrum, Texas has the lowest case rate, the lowest death rate, and the lowest age-adjusted death rate among the 15 most-populous states. Texas’ unemployment rate increased 9.3 percent over the past two months reported.
But New York City’s mass transit probably was a key contributing factor.
“Andrew Cuomo gave immunity to nursing home execs after big campaign donations.” Because being part of the Democratic Money Complex means never having to admit you’re guilty…
For the first time ever, Twitter.com, the company responded directly to one of the president’s tweets. They inserted a link below this one to declare authoritatively that the tweet was false. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” If the user has taken to a Twitter news page with a headline declaring “Trump makes the unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud.” That’s the official story. Voter fraud never happens no matter what, and it definitely won’t happen with mail-in voting. You are hearing trusted news anchors tell you that, a lot. And they say it like they know it. Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy nut, a flat Earther, a freak. Probably doesn’t vaccinate his kids.
They’re lying. That’s a lie and we know it’s a lie because of fraud at mail-in voting already happens. Not speculating. Do you have Google? Look it up. Ballot harvesting is the problem. Ballot harvesting is the process when the third-party collects and turns in ballots on behalf of another person. It’s only possible with mail-in ballots.
Laws around ballot harvesting vary from state to state. It’s currently legal in 27 states but Democrats want to legalize it in all 50, and, I wonder why. The recent House coronavirus bill declares that “all states” must permit a voter to designate any person to deliver a sealed absentee ballot. The only restriction is ballot harvesters can not be paid based on the number of ballots they collect, but of course, you could easily pay that than a campaign could pay a canvasser for their time or the distance they travel.
With unlimited ballot harvesting, there is no state supervision or chain of custody, to limit on the amount of ballots a single person can collect. Ballot harvesters can go to people’s homes, and they do in California. They pressure them to vote or vote the right way, or they help a person read through a ballot while nudging them on who to vote for.
Why stop there? You could pay a person to sign or turn in a blank ballot… Or simply throw away ballots that don’t vote the right way. We are not saying that all of these methods of fraud are equally likely, you probably could prevent some of them with safeguards but the point is this. Universal mail-in voting with ballot harvesting massively expands the potential for voter fraud and it makes a mockery of the secret ballot.
I don’t care what Twitter tells you, that’s true. It’s obvious. And by the way, it’s been documented. In the past decade, most battles over voter fraud have centered around whether to require an I.D. to vote like most every countries do. But that’s not the real issue… Ballot harvesting is the… choice for those that want to steal an election.
ACLU folds on abortion lawsuit against Texas cities over “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Which makes you wonder why. Is keeping a slender reed of hope for keeping sanctuary cities for the inevitable illegal alien amnesty more important than the sacrament of abortion? Or maybe, given that they’re all pretty small cities (Big Spring may be the largest) they just didn’t want to spend money on it?
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 that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” 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.
“Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” 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 “traditional” FISA — 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 power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s 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 “U.S. Person” is substituted — the “mask,” 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 — 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 — because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans — is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.
With that as background, let’s get back to Flynn.
For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” 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 “routine”-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. Trump’s 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 Flynn’s 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 — the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that can’t be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBI’s abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI “requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.” (IG Report’s “Executive Summary,” p. vi.)
It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak 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 administration’s Trump–Russia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBI’s July 2016 opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — 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 president’s 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 “colluded” 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 wasn’t alarmed by Flynn’s nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obama’s 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 Iran—the 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 he’d 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 deal—they 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.”
“The 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, ‘This 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.
“The Trump administration’s prosecution of election fraud stands in stark contrast to the total failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce these laws,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President Christian Adams said in a statement. “Right 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.”
As Judge of Elections, DeMuro was paid to oversee the election process in the 39th Ward, which encompasses Philadelphia.
DeMuro’s 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 “consulting fees.” The payments — which ranged from $300 to $5,000 — were then allegedly used to pay Election Board Officials, such as DeMuro, in exchange for those officials illegally adding votes for the consultants’ 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 Colorado’s announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNN’s “dashboard” 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 Trump’s 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 virus’s 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 wasn’t “a simple case of omission, ” adding that “Wang deliberately failed to disclose his Chinese grants and foreign positions and even engaged in a pervasive pattern of fraud to avoid criminal culpability.”
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-old’s 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
Hey remember how Joe Biden swore up and down he wasn’t behind the Michael Flynn unmasking scandal? Well, guess what?
Former vice president Joe Biden appears on a declassified list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The list, obtained by CBS News, shows that Biden’s office made its request to see Flynn’s identity on January 12, 2017 — the same day that Washington Post columnist David Ignatius broke news of Flynn’s calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. While the NSA says it “cannot confirm” that those listed personally saw the information, the list also names former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, former CIA director John Brennan, and former FBI director James Comey.
Wow, it’s like they got the band back together!
Power in particular sought to obtain Flynn’s redacted identity at least seven times, including twice before Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak, despite swearing under oath she “didn’t recall” doing so, which only makes sense if she’s suffering from Biden-levels of cognitive decline.
Here’s the actual list in convenient Tweet form:
SCOOP @CBSNews obtains @RichardGrenell notification to congress declassified “unmasking list” Flynn between late 2016 and January 2017 – Read 3 pages provided by NSA here pic.twitter.com/NozVpQlRn2
Deputy chief of mission Kelly Degnan (and Trump’s ambassador to Georgia…for now)
Director of Obama White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs Patrick Conlon
Principal deputy director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan
Deputy director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Integration Michael Dempsey
Obama Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew
Acting assistant secretary of the Treasury Arthur “Danny” McGlynn
Acting deputy assistant of the Treasury Mike Neufeld
Deputy secretary of the Treasury Sarah Raskin
Undersecretary of the Treasury Nathan Sheets
Acting undersecretary of the Treasury Adam Szubin
NATO advisor Robert Bell
Defense adviser for Russia at NATO Lt. Col. Paul Geehreng
Deputy defense adviser for NATO James Hursh
Deputy chief of U.S. Mission at NATO Lee Litzenberger
Deputy secretary of Energy Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall
Permanent NATO representative Douglas Lute
Political officer at NATO Scott Parish
Political adviser at NATO Tamir Waser
Ambassador to Russia John Tefft
Ambassador to Turkey John Bass
Looks like it was easier to unmask General Flynn than it was to get tickets to Hamilton.
Why so many people at Treasury for an ostensible national security matter? Why so many at NATO? Did they think Flynn was going to sell Putin defense plans (presumably after killing moose and squirrel)?
Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation.
It is not conspiracy-mongering to note that the investigation into Trump was predicated on an opposition-research document filled with fabulism and, most likely, Russian disinformation. We know the DOJ withheld contradictory evidence when it began spying on those in Trump’s orbit. We have proof that many of the relevant FISA-warrant applications — almost every one of them, actually — were based on “fabricated” evidence or riddled with errors. We know that members of the Obama administration, who had no genuine role in counterintelligence operations, repeatedly unmasked Trump’s allies. And we now know that, despite a dearth of evidence, the FBI railroaded Michael Flynn into a guilty plea so it could keep the investigation going.
What’s more, the larger context only makes all of these facts more damning. By 2016, the Obama administration’s intelligence community had normalized domestic spying. Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, famously lied about snooping on American citizens to Congress. His CIA director, John Brennan, oversaw an agency that felt comfortable spying on the Senate, with at least five of his underlings breaking into congressional computer files. His attorney general, Eric Holder, invoked the Espionage Act to spy on a Fox News journalist, shopping his case to three judges until he found one who let him name the reporter as a co-conspirator. The Obama administration also spied on Associated Press reporters, which the news organization called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” And though it’s been long forgotten, Obama officials were caught monitoring the conversations of members of Congress who opposed the Iran nuclear deal.
Want to guess who TeamBiden is spinning the revelation? Would you believe that it’s all because of…racism?
Happy Victims of Communism Day. Texas is reopening, California is closing beaches, and we contemplate the mysteries of Sweden and Denmark.
Director Blue sent me this comparison of Wuhan coronavirus curves in various countries. The point of the piece was that Sweden, which hasn’t practiced social distancing, is doing better than European countries that have. However, what I find most interesting is that Denmark seems to be doing even better. Anyone know the reason?
“New York Required Nursing Homes To Admit ‘Medically Stable’ Coronavirus Patients. The Results Were Deadly.”
On March 25, New York’s Health Department issued a mandate that state nursing homes could not refuse COVID-19-positive patients who were “medically stable,” meaning facilities that housed the most vulnerable populations were forced to introduce the virus into their midst.
A nursing home in Queens received two coronavirus patients who had been discharged from a hospital (but were still contagious and in need of care) – along with a box containing body bags, The New York Post reported. An executive at the facility told the Post it had been free of the coronavirus prior to accepting those two patients. The executive also said that along with the two patients arrived a shipment of personal protective equipment and the body bags.
“My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” the executive told the Post. “The first two coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”
The Post reported that within days, “three of the bags were filled with the first of 30 residents who would die there.” The nursing facility continued to receive shipments of five body bags per week since those first two patients arrived – and they have been needed.
“Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the nursing home executive told the outlet. “Why in the world would you be sending coronavirus patients to a nursing home, where the most vulnerable population to this disease resides?”
Speaking Cuomo scandals, here’s a look back at the Buffalo Billions crony graft scandal.
What the hell? “NYPD telling cops to prioritize 311 calls over 911.” “People getting jumped, robbed, assaulted…doesn’t matter.” How do you expect NYPD to deal with assault when there are so many people standing only five feet apart?
While Texas is starting to reopen the economy today, California Governor Gavin Newsom is closing down the beach. This is what happens when your governor is Stuck On Stupid.
Low fatality rates for 2020 are, at this point, a mystery. However, assuming I am reading the CDC spread sheet correctly, one thing is clear: there are nowhere near as many deaths actually caused by COVID-19 as government sources claim. If the Wuhan flu had really killed 40,000 or so people who would not otherwise have died over the last 14 weeks, it would be obvious in the overall mortality statistics. The fact that no such effect is visible–that, astonishingly, the death rate has actually declined–is consistent only with the assumption that not many people have died from COVID-19 who would not have died anyway, at about the same time.
In the land of Blue-on-Blue violence, Michael Moore has produced a new documentary out that takes on environmental green-washing. (The full film can be found here.)
Politico admits that a President Trump/Bank of China hit piece was completely false.
Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear slams somebody for filing for unemployment under the name “Tupac Shakur.” Tiny problem: that’s the guy’s real name.
At a press conference this morning, President Trump said "Good morning." Here are the headlines covering his controversial statement from twelve different news outlets:https://t.co/Lzg8ytpAa4pic.twitter.com/QN1U2lK4bB
Craig Coopersmith was up early that morning as usual and typed his daily inquiry into his phone. “Good morning, Team Covid,” he wrote, asking for updates from the ICU team leaders working across 10 hospitals in the Emory University health system in Atlanta.
One doctor replied that one of his patients had a strange blood problem. Despite being put on anticoagulants, the patient was still developing clots. A second said she’d seen something similar. And a third. Soon, every person on the text chat had reported the same thing.
“That’s when we knew we had a huge problem,” said Coopersmith, a critical-care surgeon. As he checked with his counterparts at other medical centers, he became increasingly alarmed: “It was in as many as 20, 30 or 40 percent of their patients.”
One month ago when the country went into lockdown to prepare for the first wave of coronavirus cases, many doctors felt confident they knew what they were dealing with. Based on early reports, covid-19 appeared to be a standard variety respiratory virus, albeit a contagious and lethal one with no vaccine and no treatment. They’ve since seen how covid-19 attacks not only the lungs, but also the kidneys, heart, intestines, liver and brain.
Read the whole thing.
A coronavirus map based on self-reported symptoms. I note that Williamson County has only about 0.32%.
Over on Borepath, there’s a good discussion of all the known unknowns of the Wuhan Coronavirus, and all the data we don’t have.
Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of the vague nature of the reporting.) In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing plants, can’t be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers haven’t released detailed date-tagged data.
Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75 percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world, but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries. (A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in late January and early February.) No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February without being reported as such, because public-health officials and journalists weren’t alive to the nature or scale of the coming pandemic. But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely bereft of publicly reported SSEs.
I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the industrial area north of Doha offers one such example). Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday parties, and other events that were described in local media as glamorous or populated by “socialites.” Examples here include a March 7th engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro “mansion” that attracted “high society” fly-ins from around the world, and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.
It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of infectious pathogens. (A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408 screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals who were COVID-19-negative.) But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York Times, “a visitor from Johannesburg—a 43-year-old businessman—fell ill on his flight home.” And the Rio party was attended by guests who’d traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.) Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.
In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities. And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or missionary work. This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people. But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a Calgary home.
Nineteen of the SSEs—about one-third—involved parties or liquor-fueled mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and birthdays.
Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business meetings—from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund official who spread the disease in Malaysia.
All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved one or more of these four activities—about 70 percent. Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.
But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five SSEs involving two warships and three cruise ships—the USS Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby Princess—at least three of which (and probably all five) featured onboard parties.
These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour: extended, close-range, face-to-face conversation—typically in crowded, socially animated spaces.
So you probably want to avoid such events for the near future. Snip.
In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate congregations that feature some combination of mass participation, folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of devotion. In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur. At Mulhouse, the week’s schedule included Christian “choir performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers, workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their illnesses… Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.” And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named Baldev Singh.
It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major COVID-19 hot spot). These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still and talk in hushed tones.
Again, read the whole thing.
Speaking of things you’re not supposed to do: “Bangladesh: Over 100,000 gather for funeral of Islamic teacher, defying coronavirus lockdown.” What could possibly go wrong? (On the other hand, if this doesn’t turn into a superspreader event, then we have some valuable data about that seemingly invariant infection curve and/or the role of sunlight/warm climates in preventing infection.)
Speaking of superspreader events, want to guess who owned that South Dakota meat packing plant with the heavy infection rate? “In September 2013 Smithfield Foods was acquired by China’s biggest meat processor, Shuanghui International Holdings, in the largest acquisition ever of a U.S. company by a Chinese one.”
Speaking of China’s perfidy, while they rest of the world was struggling with the Wuhan coronavirus, they thought it was the perfect time to arrest dissidents in Hong Kong:
Fifteen activists between 24 and 81 years old were rounded up on suspicion of organizing, publicizing or taking part in several unauthorized assemblies between August and October and will face prosecution, the police said on Saturday without disclosing their names, following protocol.
The arrested democratic heavyweights included the veteran lawyers Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, the media tycoon Jimmy Lai and the former opposition legislators Albert Ho, Lee Cheuk-yan and Leung Kwok-hung, political parties and aides said.
Half the residents of a Boston homeless shelter had the Wuhan Coronavirus, but none showed any symptoms.
If the Malevolent Donkey Party was actively seeking to plunge the country into an economic tailspin, while still maintaining some level of deniability to the credulous suckers out there, exactly what would it be doing differently? It would be pretty much doing exactly what it is doing right now – shilling for the bat-gobbling ChiComs, delaying needed assistance to keep America working, and generally trying to keep us all locked in the dark in perpetuity.
It’s fair to assume that you intend the expected consequences of the actions you take, and the consequence of the actions the Democrats are taking is economic ruin. The indisputable fact is that they’re totally cool with that if that is what gets them back into power.
Democrats are never ones to let a good crisis go to waste, and this Wuhan Flu is a very good crisis indeed if your goal is leftist hegemony. The Trump economy was booming after the near-decade of the Obama doldrums, and people were getting a taste of prosperity. But a happy, prosperous America is something the Democrat dudes can’t abide. All the Democrats had to sell were recycled cries of “RACISM!” and “RUSSIA!” and their standard-bearer was that sinewy weirdo Grandpa Badfinger, who was promising to drag us all back into the nightmare of globalist failure. The future looked grim, which means it actually looked bright for the rest of us.
So, the Chinese coronavirus was a dream come true, a deus ex pangolin that finally, after an endless series of leaks, impeachments, investigations, and media meltdowns, might be the magic bullet that actually takes Trump down.
Am I saying that the Democrats are exploiting the pandemic for their own cheesy advantage? Well, yeah. Everything they are doing is consistent with that. Everything. No, in the abstract, many of them would probably not prefer that tens of thousands of Americans die (I get enough Twitter death wishes to know, from their own filthy mouths, that some absolutely do want us to die), but their attitude seems to be that if life gives you tens of thousands of dead Americans, make political lemonade.
How can Nancy Pelosi worry about your piddling lives when there’s so much ice cream to eat?
“U.S. Intelligence Knew Russia Preferred Hillary to Trump, But John Brennan Hid the Truth, Ex-NSC Chief Says.” This story probably deserves more attention than I can give it right now…
Iran: Watch our tiny boats harass the Great Satan! President Trump: I hope you like your gunboats getting destroyed.
Won’t someone please spare a moment to think about how the coronavirus outbreak has derailed the Austin politicians’ plans to spend billions on their toy trains? (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Speaking of Austin, the coronavirus has closed landmark Austin restaurants Threadgill’s…
Is Apple moving to ARM for Mac? They’re planning to have their own Apple-designed chips fabbed at TSMC on the latter’s 5nm process. Intel, the current supplier for Mac CPUs, isn’t slatted to hit 5nm until 20203, and there’s long been talk that bringing up yield on their existing 10nm process has been in a world of hurt for a while.
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.
