Posts Tagged ‘EU’

Supply Chain Disruption Update for October 11, 2021

Monday, October 11th, 2021

Supply chain problems have gotten so bad that Derek Thompson at The Atlantic deigns to notice them:

The coronavirus pandemic has snarled global supply chains in several ways. Pandemic checks sent hundreds of billions of dollars to cabin-fevered Americans during a fallow period in the service sector. A lot of that cash has flowed to hard goods, especially home goods such as furniture and home-improvement materials. Many of these materials have to be imported from or travel through East Asia. But that region is dealing with the Delta variant, which has been considerably more deadly than previous iterations of the virus. Delta has caused several shutdowns at semiconductor factories across Asia just as demand for cars and electronics has started to pick up. As a result, these stops along the supply chain are slowing down at the very moment when Americans are demanding that they work in overdrive.

The most dramatic expression of this snarl is the purgatory of loaded cargo containers stacked on ships bobbing off the coast of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Just as a normal traffic jam consists of too many drivers trying to use too few lanes, the traffic jam at California ports has been exacerbated by extravagant consumer demand slamming into a shortage of trucks, truckers, and port workers. Because ships can’t be unloaded, not enough empty containers are in transit to carry all of the stuff that consumers are trying to buy. So the world is getting a lesson in Econ 101: High demand plus limited supply equals prices spiraling to the moon. Before the pandemic, reserving a container that holds roughly 35,000 books cost $2,500. Now it costs $25,000.

The container situation is even weirder than it looks. With demand surging in the United States, shipping a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles is currently six times more expensive than shipping one from L.A. to Shanghai. J.P. Morgan’s Michael Cembalest wrote that this has created strong incentives for container owners to ship containers to China—even if they are mostly empty—to expedite the packing and shipping of freights in Shanghai to travel east. But when containers leave Los Angeles and Long Beach empty, American-made goods that were supposed to be sent across the Pacific Ocean end up sitting around in railcars parked at West Coast ports. Since the packed railcars can’t unload their goods, they can’t go back and collect more stuff from filled warehouses in the American interior.

And what about the truckers who are needed to drive materials between warehouses, ports, stores, and houses? They’re dealing with a multidimensional shortage too. Supply-chain woes have backed up orders for parts, such as resin for roof caps and vinyl for seats. But there’s also a crucial lack of people to actually drive the rigs. The Minnesota Trucking Association estimates that the country has a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, due to longtime recruitment issues, early retirements, and COVID-canceled driving-school classes.

In short, supply chains depend on containers, ports, railroads, warehouses, and trucks. Every stage of this international assembly line is breaking down in its own unique way. When the global supply chain works, it’s like a beautifully invisible system of dominoes clicking forward. Today’s omnishambles is a reminder that dominoes can fall backwards too.

However, there are two important words missing from Thompson’s analysis: “vaccine” and “mandate.”


  • The latest industry to suffer shortages: paints and plastics.

    Like other manufacturers, petrochemical companies have been shaken by the pandemic and by how consumers and businesses responded to it. Yet petrochemicals, which are made from oil, have also run into problems all their own, one after another: A freak winter freeze in Texas. A lightning strike in Louisiana. Hurricanes along the Gulf Coast.

    All have conspired to disrupt production and raise prices.

    “There isn’t one thing wrong,” said Jeremy Pafford, managing editor for the Americas at Independent Commodity Intelligence Services (ICIS), which analyzes energy and chemical markets. “It’s kind of whack-a-mole — something goes wrong, it gets sorted out, then something else happens. And it’s been that way since the pandemic began.’’

    The price of polyvinyl chloride or PVC, used for pipes, medical devices, credit cards, vinyl records and more, has rocketed 70%. The price of epoxy resins, used for coatings, adhesives and paints, has soared 170%. Ethylene — arguably the world’s most important chemical, used in everything from food packaging to antifreeze to polyester — has surged 43%, according to ICIS figures.

    The root of the problem has become a familiar one in the 18 months since the pandemic ignited a brief but brutal recession: As the economy sank into near-paralysis, petrochemical producers, like manufacturers of all types, slashed production. So they were caught flat-footed when the unexpected happened: The economy swiftly bounced back, and consumers, flush with cash from government relief aid and stockpiles of savings, resumed spending with astonishing speed and vigor.

    Suddenly, companies were scrambling to acquire raw materials and parts to meet surging orders. Panic buying worsened the shortages as companies rushed to stock up while they could.

  • Expecting these problems to be transitory? Dubai’s largest port operator says to expect supply chain problems to extend in 2023.
  • Adding to shipping woes: Marine fuel is at a seven year high.
  • India institutes rolling blackouts over a coal shortage.
  • Brazil is also having to import more natural gas.
  • Energy problems are only expected to get worse:

    A global energy crunch caused by weather and a resurgence in demand is getting worse, stirring alarm ahead of the winter, when more energy is needed to light and heat homes. Governments around the world are trying to limit the impact on consumers, but acknowledge they may not be able to prevent bills spiking.

    Further complicating the picture is mounting pressure on governments to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in November.

    Translation: Green energy mandates = blackouts.

    In China, rolling blackouts for residents have already begun, while in India power stations are scrambling for coal. Consumer advocates in Europe are calling for a ban on disconnections if customers can’t promptly settle what they owe.

    “This price shock is an unexpected crisis at a critical juncture,” EU energy chief Kadri Simson said Wednesday, confirming the bloc will outline its longer-term policy response next week. “The immediate priority should be to mitigate social impacts and protect vulnerable households.”

    In Europe, natural gas is now trading at the equivalent of $230 per barrel, in oil terms — up more than 130% since the beginning of September and more than eight times higher than the same point last year, according to data from Independent Commodity Intelligence Services.

    In East Asia, the cost of natural gas is up 85% since the start of September, hitting roughly $204 per barrel in oil terms. Prices remain much lower in the United States, a net exporter of natural gas, but still have shot up to their highest levels in 13 years.

    Wait, you mean relying on Russian benevolence wasn’t an optimal strategy? Do tell.

  • There’s also panic buying to secure winter supplies, especially in China, where “the central government there has given state-owned energy companies a directive to secure winter energy supplies at any and all costs.”
  • Steel and roofing supplies are also facing shortages.

    Steel, roofing and insulation materials are some of the most difficult products to get right now, said Ken Simonson, chief economist at the Associated General Contractors of America. Bar joists, which are used to frame roofs, can have lead times of anywhere from 10 months to 14 months.

    Costs have also soared, with the index for steel mill products rising 123% YoY in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index. Copper and brass mill shapes jumped 45.3% YoY, while plastic construction products saw increases of just under 30% YoY.

  • Also in short supply: HVAC parts:

    A few weeks ago I spoke with several people intimately involved with large companies in my industry and they all agree that we have probably another year of supply chain disruptions and problems. That wasn’t exactly music to my ears as the last year and a half has been an intense marathon trying to keep my buildings full of product that my dealers need. The reasons are everything that you have heard before here and on other media outlets – labor shortages, raw material issues and now, chip problems.

    The chip problem could be a really big issue as those chips go into printed circuit boards that control furnaces – and we need furnaces now for Fall.

    My one large exception mentioned above is that my inventory levels are absolutely enormous and we are setting new records daily. This is killing my turns and as a result cash, but this is the new model. We simply can’t predict when things will come in so we have to pile in sometimes a full years worth of a widget. We are absolutely bursting at the seams and it is extremely stressful trying to keep everyone happy. We don’t dare cancel any orders as we would go to the back of the line, so it is what it is.

    Freight is a major issue right now. We get damage all the time and the LTL lines are all extremely slow and sloppy. Hardly a day goes by where we don’t have a freight problem.

    Parts don’t really seem to be an issue. Sure, there are certain things that we have problems with, but in general the parts world is OK so there is that silver lining.

  • Even oats, the lowly horse and breakfast food, is hitting all-time highs.

    This year, a devastating drought in North American oat fields has resulted in the lowest harvest for the cereal grain in years, pushing prices to record highs, a warning sign that breakfast inflation is imminent.

    Scorching heat waves in Candian oat fields slashed production to an 11-year low. Canada, the world’s biggest exporter, ships most of its oats to the US, its largest consumer.

    The result so far has been a new record high in oats futures trading on the CME. The sudden spike in prices has yet to ripple through supply chains to affect consumers, though that will be coming.

    According to Bloomberg, “the situation for North American farmers was so dire in the summer that many cut their losses and harvested damaged plants to be sold as feed for animals.”

    What this means for consumers is that dwindling supplies and record-high prices will soon affect foods like cereals, oatmeal, and granola bars, all popular breakfast items.

    Randy Strychar, president of Ag Commodity Research and Oatinformation.com, said Cheerios, the US’ most popular cereal, is made entirely of oats. He said there’s no substitute for the ingredient: “You can’t make a Cheerio out of barley.”

    General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Nature Valley granola bars, nor Quaker Oats Company, the maker of oatmeal, among others, have yet to announce price increase of their oat products, but that could be imminent or at least create an illusion of stable prices through shrinkflation.

  • Retailers say they’re getting ready for a lot of bare shelves.

    Before retailers can make their sales, they need stuff to sell. That’s where the trouble is this year. Container ships are packed, ports are clogged, contracts with carriers are falling to the wayside. And the rush to ship goods for the holidays is only adding traffic to what was already intense congestion.

    “There aren’t enough containers. There aren’t enough ships. There aren’t enough trucks or trains. There is more volume now than any part of the supply chain pipe can adequately handle,” Burlington Stores Chief Financial Officer John Crimmins told analysts in late August. Trying to accelerate and pull forward orders “even further increased the pressure on the supply chain, helping to drive even higher rates,” the executive added.

    So not only are retailers competing with each other for sales, they are competing just to get cargo space to ship goods into the country. Freight has skyrocketed as a result, and shipments still lag or even fail to materialize. Many of the bottlenecks are tied to the unexpectedly swift surge in consumer demand in the U.S. this year, combined with capacity shortfalls at numerous points along the supply chain.

  • That’s one reason big retailers like Walmart are chartering their own vessels. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • There’s even a backup for ships to unload at the Port of Houston:

  • Why does UK have a truck driver shortage? Evidently they get treated like garbage compared to European drivers.
  • LinkSwarm for August 13, 2021

    Friday, August 13th, 2021

    Happy Friday the 13th!

    This week’s LinkSwarm features Democrats behaving badly (a timeless theme).

  • Immediately after Senate Republicans caved on the pork-filled infrastructure bill, Democrats turned around and passed a highly partisan $3.5 billion budget bill. Good job, idiots.
  • Hunter Biden is the gift that keeps digging: “The Russians have videos of me doing crazy f***ing sex!’ Hunter Biden is seen in unearthed footage telling prostitute that Russian drug dealers stole ANOTHER of his laptops.” 1. Hunter has more Russian-related felonies in a single weekend than Donald Trump had in his entire lifetime. 2. I don’t lose pennies the way Hunter loses laptops…
  • “How Many Other Andrew Cuomos Are Elites Covering For?”

    The obvious fact is, however, that this corrupt corporate press and the Jennifer Rubin “conservatives” of the world are the ones who propped Cuomo up as “the gold standard,” to use Joe Biden’s words, even describing themselves as “Cuomosexuals.”

    Cuomo’s “radical transparency” made him a “terrific bureaucrat,” they said. Cuomo is “inspiring, uplifting, fascinating,” and truly “magnificent,” they insisted. He’s “honest, direct, brave,” and what “real leadership” looks like. Elites gave him an Emmy and blessed him with softball interviews and comedy-hour airtime, with left-wing activists working behind the scenes to discredit Cuomo’s accusers.

    Tuesday’s resignation signals it’s the end of the road for Cuomo — for now. But if the media can sit and twiddle its thumbs — or worse, kiss keister and perform comedy sketches with giant Q-Tips — while thousands of elderly folks die in New York nursing homes and women in the double digits tell of a gropey governor’s disgusting habits, we must ask: How many other Andrew Cuomos is the media covering for?

    Covering for elite misconduct is a perpetual problem in the media; it didn’t start with Cuomo. As Federalist Political Editor John Daniel Davidson wrote on Tuesday, the media did the same with Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and Theodore McCarrick. Don’t forget Bill Clinton or Roman Polanski, either.

    “Everyone knew. No one cared. No one said anything until forced to. Then the feigned shock and outrage, the concern about the treatment of women, the hand-wringing and Me Too-ing, the performances on social media,” Davidson wrote. “As long as sexual harassment, assault, abuse, even the sex trafficking of underage girls stays quiet, then [the media] stay quiet, too.”

  • “New York’s Capital Is Crazytown

    You read all this and think: The governor is a letch, a creep, a dirty old man. But also a nut—a high-functioning one, a politically talented one, but a nut. Only a nut would do these things, and only a nut would think he wouldn’t be found out.

    No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.

  • Cuomo could still end up in prison. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Arizona state Sen. Tony Navarrete resigns seat after arrest in child sex abuse case.”
  • Old and busted: Democrats want to segregate students by race. The new hotness: Democrats want to segregate students by race.
  • How inflation is undoing the four years of wage growth and price deflation President Trump brought to the economy.

    Read the whole thing, especially the parts on the EU and Canada.

  • Devin Hogan, head of the Minneapolis Democratic Party, said that burning down a police building was “an act of pure righteousness.”
  • “Swiss Police Threaten to Stop Enforcing COVID-19 Rules. Group warns in letter that lockdown laws violate fundamental rights.”
  • Oregon has decided that it’s going to stop requiring Oregon high school graduates to prove they can read and write.
  • Baltimore professor arrested for dealing math. “Prof. Edward C. Ennels taught math at Baltimore City Community College but appears to have been offering a running lesson on supply side economic theory. Ennels reportedly was selling grades on a sliding scale depending on your worth and your ambition: $150 for a C; $250 for a B; and $500 for an A. He has now earned jail time after pleading to 11 misdemeanor charges, including bribery and misconduct in office.”
  • Speaking of Baltimore schools failing their students: Some Baltimore high school students test at grade school levels.
  • Dan Crenshaw slams Jennifer Ruben for a huge mistake:

    That’s a big mistake even by her standards. How did she make it? The Texas Tribune screwed the pooch on the original story:

    That’s a hell of a correction. “When we wrote Nolan Ryan struck out 383 batters in a single game, we meant he struck out that many in a single season…”

  • YouTube takes down another video by Rand Paul.(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Dumbass: Running from the police. Extra Dumbass: In a stolen vehicle. Super Turbo Dumbass: On a stolen ATV. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Mongo ist nur Schachfigur im großen Spiel des Lebens.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Dems Considering Another Lockdown To Wipe Out The Few Small Businesses That Survived The Last One.”
  • “Bill Gates Announces He Too Will Go To Space Once His Rocket Is Finished Installing Updates.”
  • Golden throats:

  • Bosch’s New Fab And The State of European Semiconductors

    Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021

    This is interesting for what it says about the state of European semiconductor manufacturing:

    German tech giant Bosch has opened the doors to a new semiconductor manufacturing facility in Dresden, which it hopes will plug the significant hole currently plaguing automotive supply chains.

    The site – which was estimated to cost the company in excess of €1 billion (AU$1.57 billion) to build – will reportedly begin producing much-needed chips for vehicles by early September this year. It is so far unclear how the product will be distributed, and if German manufacturers – including Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz – will be given priority in the queue.

    “The new [factory] is the single largest investment in the company’s history. This cannot be stressed too much. Its size and additional production capacity alone are impressive. The very latest methods of data-driven continuous improvement in production make the Dresden plant a smart factory,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

    “To put it another way: in this plant, natural and artificial intelligence have joined forces with the internet of things to form a productive symbiosis.”

    Here Alte Jungfer Merkel is no doubt repeating some generic technomarketingspeak handed to her by an aide, as I suspect Merkel is as ignorant of current developments in artificial intelligence as I am of the songs she sang in the Freie Deutsche Jugend.

    Here’s a Deutsche Weil English video segment on the fab, for which the headline says “Europe aims for independence from Asia”:

    How cutting edge will the Bosch fab be?

    The 300mm fab has been under construction since June 2018 and as recently as October 2019 it was stated that the Dresden wafer fab was expected to start operations in spring 2020…

    The fab makes use of 5G communications and artificial intelligence [there’s that phrase again -LP] for extensive automation and will be used for the manufacture of power semiconductors and ASICs for automotive applications down to a minimum geometry of 65nm, according to a company spokesperson.

    (record scratch)

    300mm is industry standard, and Dresden makes sense, as Infineon, Global Foundries and X-FAB already have fabs there, so there’s a skilled labor pool to draw on. The strange thing here is spending $1.2 building a new 65nm fab, since that’s about seven process node generations behind the cutting edge. 65nm was cutting edge way back in 2005.

    You don’t need cutting edge process technology to build automotive integrated circuits, which tend to use older process nodes, but 65nm doesn’t give you much headroom for the long haul. It also doesn’t really do much to “compete with Asia,” since it’s hopelessly behind not only leaders TSMC and Samsung, but also about half the fabs run by Chinese companies SMIC and Unigroup. It’s hard to see investing $1 billion in building a older technology fab as opposed to contracting out production to foundries. (Of course, foundry capacity is highly constrained right now, and maybe Bosch leadership was able to see that coming when they broke ground in 2018.)

    Could it still turn out to be a decent investment? Possibly. In the short haul it will relieve the current capacity crunch and let Bosch gain share from competitors who can’t book foundry production. Plus semiconductor manufacturing seems like the sort of thing European governments like to subsidize. And indeed, the DW piece notes that “The German government also invested in the plant.” (It also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that various inscrutable, multi-acronym EU agencies unknown to voters in Barcelona and Gdansk are also kicking in money.) Fueled by taxpayer money, building a 65nm fab could still be a profitable proposition for Bosch.

    But fabs close all the time, even 300mm fabs. Building a fab dedicated to such an old process node makes profitability a much more challenging proposition, especially given the next (inevitable) industry downturn. You only have so many years before everything is obsolete. Bosch has given themselves a very short runway to profitability for this investment.

    Back in the 1990s, Europe was competitive with American and Japanese semiconductor companies, with fabs built in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and even Italy. Today, of those countries, only Ireland (Intel) and Germany have any 300mm fabs at all, despite having a highly educated workforce and modern technological infrastructure. (Russia evidently has one as well, owned by Crocus Nano Electronics (about which I know next to nothing), also running 65nm, that started production in 2015.) Europe’s semiconductor industry has been passed not only by Taiwan and South Korea, but also by China.

    While Europe was integrating, its semiconductor manufacturing capacity was stagnating. Highly integrated, yes, but also highly regulated and highly unionized.

    As I’ve said before, building cutting edge fabs is a very expensive game to play. Collectively, the world has decided that Europe is not a suitable location for one.

    World Finally Tired Of China’s BS?

    Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

    If by “the World” you mean “the EU,” then the answer is “maybe a little bit“:

    In a historic shift, the European Union has imposed sanctions against Communist China for the first time in more than thirty years. Brussels froze Chinese assets and sanctioned four senior Chinese officials for their role in human rights violations inside China — the first measure of its kind since the end of the Cold War.

    “The move from Brussels represents the first punitive measure against Beijing since the arms embargo that the then-twelve member states imposed in 1989 on Communist China due to the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square,” the French TV network Euronews reported.

    The Associated Press reported the details of the EU sanctions:

    The EU targeted four senior officials in Xinjiang. The sanctions involve a freeze on the officials’ assets and a ban on them traveling in the bloc. European citizens and companies are not permitted to provide them with financial assistance.

    The 27-nation bloc also froze the assets of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau, which it describes as a “state-owned economic and paramilitary organization” that runs Xinjiang and controls its economy.

    British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said the measures were part of “intensive diplomacy” by the U.K, the United States, Canada and the 27-nation EU to force action amid mounting evidence about serious rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslim people.

    The Reuters news agency described the significance of the EU measures: “While mainly symbolic, the EU sanctions mark a significant hardening in the bloc’s policy towards China, which Brussels long regarded as a benign trading partner but now views as a systematic abuser of basic rights and freedoms.”

    Those sanctions are so anemic that they make an actual slap on the wrist look like a knockout punch from a in-his-prime Mike Tyson. Anemic though they were, the United States, the UK and Canada joined in:

    In coordination with the newly announced European Union sanctions on select Beijing officials for the alleged ongoing major crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, the Biden administration has hit Beijing with its own punitive sanctions, setting tensions further on edge just two days after the conclusion of the fiery Alaska summit.

    The US sanctions target two top Chinese officials for “serious human rights abuses” against Uighur minorities concentrated in northwest Xinjiang province. Along with the EU, the sanctions were coordinated with Canada and the United Kingdom, which rolled out with similarly targeted sanctions that included additional individuals, according to a Treasury Department statement.

    “Chinese authorities will continue to face consequences as long as atrocities occur in Xinjiang,” Treasury’s Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control Andrea M. Gacki said…

    “Treasury is committed to promoting accountability for the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention and torture, against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities,” she added. The statement identified the following individuals that fall under the new US action:

    The US designated Wang Junzheng, the Secretary of the Party Committee of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and Chen Mingguo, Director of the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.

    “These individuals are designated pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13818, which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act and targets perpetrators of serious human rights abuse and corruption,” the Treasury Department added.

    The UK government meanwhile said of the coordinated actions in a statement: “Acting together sends the clearest possible signal that the international community is united in its condemnation of China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang and the need for Beijing to end its discriminatory and oppressive practices in the region.”

    Such small, targeted sanctions are basically one step up from the dreaded Strongly Worded Letter, and will not hurt China nearly as badly as the Trump Administration’s trade sanctions or the designation that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous. Nor did The Hague’s ruling against China on its South China Sea territorial claims seem to have any perceivable effect on its actions.

    But these declarations at least start to get the bureaucratic wheels rolling. The Magnitsky Act designation is treated with real ire by foreign government, so presumably some actual consequences (however slight) might result.

    But stronger medicine is required to deter China from its many criminal enterprises, and no one in the international community seems to know what might actually deter them. Or the gumption to pursue them.

    The Trump White House’s List Of Trump’s Accomplishments

    Sunday, January 24th, 2021

    I wanted to compile a list of the Trump Administration’s pluses and minuses (and, indeed, still might). One source I was going to draw from was the WhiteHouse.gov list of Trump Accomplishments. However, the Biden Administration took that down. As a service, and for the Historical Record, I’ve fished that list out of the Wayback Machine and am posting it below. (Plus you never know when the Biden Administration might ask the Wayback Machine to remove it from their records.) I’ve even tried to replicate the formatting.


    As of January 2021

    Trump Administration Accomplishments

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Unprecedented Economic Boom

    Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.

    • America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.
    • Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.
    • The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.
    • Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.
    • More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.
    • Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.
    • The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.
    • Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.

    Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.

    • Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.
    • Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.
    • Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.
    • Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.
    • Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.
    • The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.
    • Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.
    • African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.

    Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.

    • Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.
    • Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.
    • Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.

    Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.

    • The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.
    • The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.

    Rebuilding and investing in rural America.

    • Signed an Executive Order on Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in American farming and agriculture.
    • Strengthened America’s rural economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America.

    Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.

    • An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.
    • During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.
    • Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.
    • Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.
    • Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April – beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020.
    • Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration.
    • Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.
    • 80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.
    • Small business confidence hit a new high.
    • Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.
    • Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.
    • Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.
    • Home prices hit an all-time record high.
    • The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.
    • Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.
    • Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Tax Relief for the Middle Class

    Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.

    • Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.
    • More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.
    • A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.
    • Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.
    • Doubled the child tax credit.
    • Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.
    • Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.
    • Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.
    • Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.
    • Since the passage of tax cuts, the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.
    • Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.
    • Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.
    • Lower investment cost and higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real wages, and international competitiveness.

    Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.

    • Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.
    • Opportunity Zone designations have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone residents who own their own home.
    • Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new jobs.
    • Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.
    • Private equity investments into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated Opportunity Zones.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Massive Deregulation

    Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.

    • Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.
    • Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.
    • Reduced the direct cost of regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.
    • Removed nearly 25,000 pages from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous administration added over 16,000 pages.
    • Established the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at the state, local, and tribal levels.
    • Signed an executive order to make it easier for businesses to offer retirement plans.
    • Signed two executive orders to increase transparency in Federal agencies and protect Americans and their small businesses from administrative abuse.
    • Modernized the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the first time in over 40 years.
    • Reduced approval times for major infrastructure projects from 10 or more years down to 2 years or less.
    • Helped community banks by signing legislation that rolled back costly provisions of Dodd-Frank.
    • Established the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing to bring down housing costs.
    • Removed regulations that threatened the development of a strong and stable internet.
    • Eased and simplified restrictions on rocket launches, helping to spur commercial investment in space projects.
    • Published a whole-of-government strategy focused on ensuring American leadership in automated vehicle technology.
    • Streamlined energy efficiency regulations for American families and businesses, including preserving affordable lightbulbs, enhancing the utility of showerheads, and enabling greater time savings with dishwashers.
    • Removed unnecessary regulations that restrict the seafood industry and impede job creation.
    • Modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology regulations to put America in the lead to develop new technologies.
    • Took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, including lifting restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators.

    Successfully rolled back burdensome regulatory overreach.

    • Rescinded the previous administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which would have abolished zoning for single-family housing to build low-income, federally subsidized apartments.
    • Issued a final rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard.
    • Eliminated the Waters of the United States Rule and replaced it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, providing relief and certainty for farmers and property owners.
    • Repealed the previous administration’s costly fuel economy regulations by finalizing the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which will make cars more affordable, and lower the price of new vehicles by an estimated $2,200.

    Americans now have more money in their pockets.

    • Deregulation had an especially beneficial impact on low-income Americans who pay a much higher share of their incomes for overregulation.
    • Cut red tape in the healthcare industry, providing Americans with more affordable healthcare and saving Americans nearly 10 percent on prescription drugs.
    • Deregulatory efforts yielded savings to the medical community an estimated $6.6 billion – with a reduction of 42 million hours of regulatory compliance work through 2021.
    • Removed government barriers to personal freedom and consumer choice in healthcare.
    • Once fully in effect, 20 major deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump Administration are expected to save American consumers and businesses over $220 billion per year.
    • Signed 16 pieces of deregulatory legislation that will result in a $40 billion increase in annual real incomes.

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    Fair and Reciprocal Trade

    Secured historic trade deals to defend American workers.

    • Immediately withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
    • Ended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and replaced it with the brand new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
    • The USMCA contains powerful new protections for American manufacturers, auto-makers, farmers, dairy producers, and workers.
    • The USMCA is expected to generate over $68 billion in economic activity and potentially create over 550,000 new jobs over ten years.
    • Signed an executive order making it government policy to Buy American and Hire American, and took action to stop the outsourcing of jobs overseas.
    • Negotiated with Japan to slash tariffs and open its market to $7 billion in American agricultural products and ended its ban on potatoes and lamb.
    • Over 90 percent of American agricultural exports to Japan now receive preferential treatment, and most are duty-free.
    • Negotiated another deal with Japan to boost $40 billion worth of digital trade.
    • Renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement, doubling the cap on imports of American vehicles and extending the American light truck tariff.
    • Reached a written, fully-enforceable Phase One trade agreement with China on confronting pirated and counterfeit goods, and the protection of American ideas, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks.
    • China agreed to purchase an additional $200 billion worth of United States exports and opened market access for over 4,000 American facilities to exports while all tariffs remained in effect.
    • Achieved a mutual agreement with the European Union (EU) that addresses unfair trade practices and increases duty-free exports by 180 percent to $420 million.
    • Secured a pledge from the EU to eliminate tariffs on American lobster – the first United States-European Union negotiated tariff reduction in over 20 years.
    • Scored a historic victory by overhauling the Universal Postal Union, whose outdated policies were undermining American workers and interests.
    • Engaged extensively with trade partners like the EU and Japan to advance reforms to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
    • Issued a first-ever comprehensive report on the WTO Appellate Body’s failures to comply with WTO rules and interpret WTO agreements as written.
    • Blocked nominees to the WTO’s Appellate Body until WTO Members recognize and address longstanding issues with Appellate Body activism.
    • Submitted 5 papers to the WTO Committee on Agriculture to improve Members’ understanding of how trade policies are implemented, highlight areas for improved transparency, and encourage members to maintain up-to-date notifications on market access and domestic support.

    Took strong actions to confront unfair trade practices and put America First.

    • Imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods to protect American jobs and stop China’s abuses under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
    • Directed an all-of-government effort to halt and punish efforts by the Communist Party of China to steal and profit from American innovations and intellectual property.
    • Imposed tariffs on foreign aluminum and foreign steel to protect our vital industries and support our national security.
    • Approved tariffs on $1.8 billion in imports of washing machines and $8.5 billion in imports of solar panels.
    • Blocked illegal timber imports from Peru.
    • Took action against France for its digital services tax that unfairly targets American technology companies.
    • `Launched investigations into digital services taxes that have been proposed or adopted by 10 other countries.

    Historic support for American farmers.

    • Successfully negotiated more than 50 agreements with countries around the world to increase foreign market access and boost exports of American agriculture products, supporting more than 1 million American jobs.
    • Authorized $28 billion in aid for farmers who have been subjected to unfair trade practices – fully funded by the tariffs paid by China.
    • China lifted its ban on poultry, opened its market to beef, and agreed to purchase at least $80 billion of American agricultural products in the next two years.
    • The European Union agreed to increase beef imports by 180 percent and opened up its market to more imports of soybeans.
    • South Korea lifted its ban on American poultry and eggs, and agreed to provide market access for record exports of American rice.
    • Argentina lifted its ban on American pork.
    • Brazil agreed to increase wheat imports by $180 million a year and raised its quotas for purchases of United States ethanol.
    • Guatemala and Tunisia opened up their markets to American eggs.
    • Won tariff exemptions in Ecuador for wheat and soybeans.
    • Suspended $817 million in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program due to its failure to adequately provide reasonable market access for American pork products.
    • The amount of food stamps redeemed at farmers markets increased from $1.4 million in May 2020 to $1.75 million in September 2020 – a 50 percent increase over last year.
    • Rapidly deployed the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided $30 billion in support to farmers and ranchers facing decreased prices and market disruption when COVID-19 impacted the food supply chain.
    • Authorized more than $6 billion for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which delivered over 128 million boxes of locally sourced, produce, meat, and dairy products to charity and faith-based organizations nationwide.
    • Delegated authorities via the Defense Production Act to protect breaks in the American food supply chain as a result of COVID-19.

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    American Energy Independence

    Unleashed America’s oil and natural gas potential.

    • For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States has become a net energy exporter.
    • The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
    • Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.
    • The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.
    • Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.
    • Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule.
    • Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
    • Opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil and gas leasing.
    • Repealed the last administration’s Federal Coal Leasing Moratorium, which prohibited coal leasing on Federal lands.
    • Reformed permitting rules to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and speed approval for mines.
    • Fixed the New Source Review permitting program, which punished companies for upgrading or repairing coal power plants.
    • Fixed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) steam electric and coal ash rules.
    • The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump.
    • Signed legislation repealing the harmful Stream Protection Rule.
    • Reduced the time to approve drilling permits on public lands by half, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent.
    • Expedited approval of the NuStar’s New Burgos pipeline to export American gasoline to Mexico.
    • Streamlined Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal permitting and allowed long-term LNG export authorizations to be extended through 2050.
    • The United States is now among the top three LNG exporters in the world.
    • Increased LNG exports five-fold since January 2017, reaching an all-time high in January 2020.
    • LNG exports are expected to reduce the American trade deficit by over $10 billion.
    • Granted more than 20 new long-term approvals for LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries.
    • The development of natural gas and LNG infrastructure in the United States is providing tens of thousands of jobs, and has led to the investment of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure.
    • There are now 6 LNG export facilities operating in the United States, with 2 additional export projects under construction.
    • The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles.
    • Prevented Russian energy coercion across Europe through various lines of effort, including the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
    • Issued the Presidential Permit for the A2A railroad between Canada and Alaska, providing energy resources to emerging markets.

    Increased access to our country’s abundant natural resources in order to achieve energy independence.

    • Renewable energy production and consumption both reached record highs in 2019.
    • Enacted policies that helped double the amount of electricity generated by solar and helped increase the amount of wind generation by 32 percent from 2016 through 2019.
    • Accelerated construction of energy infrastructure to ensure American energy producers can deliver their products to the market.
    • Cut red tape holding back the construction of new energy infrastructure.
    • Authorized ethanol producers to sell E15 year-round and allowed higher-ethanol gasoline to be distributed from existing pumps at filling stations.
    • Ensured greater transparency and certainty in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.
    • Negotiated leasing capacity in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Australia, providing American taxpayers a return on this infrastructure investment.
    • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
    • Reformed Section 401 of the Clean Water Act regulation to allow for the curation of interstate infrastructure.
    • Resolved the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis during COVID-19 by getting OPEC, Russia, and others to cut nearly 10 million barrels of production a day, stabilizing world oil prices.
    • Directed the Department of Energy to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate market volatility caused by COVID-19.

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    Investing in America’s Workers and Families

    Affordable and high-quality Child Care for American workers and their families.

    • Doubled the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanded the eligibility for receiving the credit.
    • Nearly 40 million families benefitted from the child tax credit (CTC), receiving an average benefit of $2,200 – totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.
    • Signed the largest-ever increase in Child Care and Development Block Grants – expanding access to quality, affordable child care for more than 800,000 low-income families.
    • Secured an additional $3.5 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help families and first responders with child care needs.
    • Created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less.
    • Signed into law 12-weeks of paid parental leave for Federal workers.
    • Signed into law a provision that enables new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.

    Advanced apprenticeship career pathways to good-paying jobs.

    • Expanded apprenticeships to more than 850,000 and established the new Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship programs in new and emerging fields.
    • Established the National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.
    • Over 460 companies have signed the Pledge to America’s Workers, committing to provide more than 16 million job and training opportunities.
    • Signed an executive order that directs the Federal government to replace outdated degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

    Advanced women’s economic empowerment.

    • Included women’s empowerment for the first time in the President’s 2017 National Security Strategy.
    • Signed into law key pieces of legislation, including the Women, Peace, and Security Act and the Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.
    • Launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative – the first-ever whole-of-government approach to women’s economic empowerment that has reached 24 million women worldwide.
    • Established an innovative new W-GDP Fund at USAID.
    • Launched the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) with 13 other nations.
    • Announced a $50 million donation on behalf of the United States to We-Fi providing more capital to women-owned businesses around the world.
    • Released the first-ever Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, which focused on increasing women’s participation to prevent and resolve conflicts.
    • Launched the W-GDP 2x Global Women’s Initiative with the Development Finance Corporation, which has mobilized more than $3 billion in private sector investments over three years.

    Ensured American leadership in technology and innovation.

    • First administration to name artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and 5G communications as national research and development priorities.
    • Launched the American Broadband Initiative to promote the rapid deployment of broadband internet across rural America.
    • Made 100 megahertz of crucial mid-band spectrum available for commercial operations, a key factor to driving widespread 5G access across rural America.
    • Launched the American AI Initiative to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), and established the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.
    • Established the first-ever principles for Federal agency adoption of AI to improve services for the American people.
    • Signed the National Quantum Initiative Act establishing the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House to drive breakthroughs in quantum information science.
    • Signed the Secure 5G and Beyond Act to ensure America leads the world in 5G.
    • Launched a groundbreaking program to test safe and innovative commercial drone operations nationwide.
    • Issued new rulemaking to accelerate the return of American civil supersonic aviation.
    • Committed to doubling investments in AI and quantum information science (QIS) research and development.
    • Announced the establishment of $1 billion AI and quantum research institutes across America.
    • Established the largest dual-use 5G test sites in the world to advance 5G commercial and military innovation.
    • Signed landmark Prague Principles with America’s allies to advance the deployment of secure 5G telecommunications networks.
    • Signed first-ever bilateral AI cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom.
    • Built collation among allies to ban Chinese Telecom Company Huawei from their 5G infrastructure.

    Preserved American jobs for American workers and rejected the importation of cheap foreign labor.

    • Pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to reverse their decision to lay off over 200 American workers and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.
    • Removed the TVA Chairman of the Board and a TVA Board Member.

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    Life-Saving Response to the China Virus

    Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world.

    • Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives.
    • Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures, and to undergo a self-quarantine.
    • Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil.
    • Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel.
    • Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens.
    • Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad on more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories.
    • Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships.
    • Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States.

    Acted early to combat the China Virus in the United States.

    • Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to keep workplaces safe.
    • Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the Virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China.
    • Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act.
    • Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center.
    • Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the Virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts.
    • Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation.
    • Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans.
    • Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs.
    • Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread.

    Re-purposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies.

    • Distributed billions of pieces of Personal Protective Equipment, including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields.
    • Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA.
    • Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the industrial base.
    • Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators.
    • Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks.
    • The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals.
    • Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans.
    • Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles.
    • Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response.
    • Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies.
    • Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share.
    • Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need.
    • Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE.
    • Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States.
    • Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry.
    • Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials and industry partners.
    • The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected.

    Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile.

    • Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000.
    • Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator.
    • Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million.
    • Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States.

    Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world.

    • Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests – more than all of the European Union combined.
    • Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day.
    • Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests.
    • Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country.
    • Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests.
    • Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options.
    • Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration.
    • Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners.

    Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives.

    • The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world.
    • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity.
    • More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages.
    • Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail.
    • Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug.
    • Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma.
    • Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent.
    • Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19.
    • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies.
    • Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third.
    • Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients.
    • Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its anti-body treatments.
    • Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic.
    • Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.
    • Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma.
    • Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19.
    • Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab.
    • FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together.
    • Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate coronavirus research.

    Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time.

    • Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021.
    • Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history.
    • Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective – far exceeding all expectations.
    • AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials.
    • The vaccines will be administered within 24 hours of FDA-approval.
    • Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow.
    • FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers.
    • Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors.
    • Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations.
    • Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance.
    • Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacturing, and distribution of their vaccines.
    • Moderna announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
    • Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass-manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate.
    • Pfizer announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
    • Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate.
    • Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
    • Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate.
    • AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
    • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected.
    • Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine.
    • Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines.
    • Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products.
    • Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines.
    • Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines.
    • Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines.

    Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents.

    • Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors.
    • Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
    • Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly.
    • Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.
    • Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the Nation Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing homes.
    • Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks.
    • Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus.
    • Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities.
    • Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the coronavirus.
    • Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus.
    • Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation.
    • Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities.
    • Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams.
    • Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning.

    Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work.

    • Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country. Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs.
    • Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19, and investigating over 10,000 coronavirus-related complaints and referrals.
    • Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools.
    • Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts.
    • Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching.
    • Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football.

    Rescued the American economy with nearly $3.4 trillion in relief, the largest financial aid package in history.

    • Secured an initial $8.3 billion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Act, supporting the development of treatments and vaccines, and to procure critical medical supplies and equipment.
    • Signed the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, guaranteeing free coronavirus testing, emergency paid sick leave and family leave, Medicaid funding, and food assistance.
    • Signed the $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, providing unprecedented and immediate relief to American families, workers, and businesses.
    • Signed additional legislation providing nearly $900 billion in support for coronavirus emergency response and relief, including critically needed funds to continue the Paycheck Protection Program.
    • Signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act, adding an additional $310 billion to replenish the program.
    • Delivered approximately 160 million relief payments to hardworking Americans.
    • Through the Paycheck Protection Program, approved over $525 billion in forgivable loans to more than 5.2 million small businesses, supporting more than 51 million American jobs.
    • The Treasury Department approved the establishment of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to provide liquidity to the financial system.
    • The Treasury Department, working with the Federal Reserve, was able to leverage approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending facilities.
    • Signed an executive order extending expanded unemployment benefits.
    • Signed an executive order to temporarily suspend student loan payments, evictions, and collection of payroll taxes.
    • Small Business Administration expanded access to emergency economic assistance for small businesses, faith-based, and religious entities.
    • Protected jobs for American workers impacted by COVID-19 by temporarily suspending several job-related nonimmigrant visas, including H-1B’s, H-2B’s without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4’s, as well as L’s and certain J’s.

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    Great Healthcare for Americans

    Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.

    • Eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate – a financial relief to low and middle-income households that made up nearly 80 percent of the families who paid the penalty for not wanting to purchase health insurance.
    • Increased choice for consumers by promoting competition in the individual health insurance market leading to lower premiums for three years in a row.
    • Under the Trump Administration, more than 90 percent of the counties have multiple options on the individual insurance market to choose from.
    • Offered Association Health Plans, which allow employers to pool together and offer more affordable, quality health coverage to their employees at up to 30 percent lower cost.
    • Increased availability of short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can cost up to 60 percent less than traditional plans, giving Americans more flexibility to choose plans that suit their needs.
    • Expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements, allowing millions of Americans to be able to shop for a plan of their choice on the individual market, and then have their employer cover the cost.
    • Added 2,100 new Medicare Advantage plan options since 2017, a 76 percent increase.
    • Lowered Medicare Advantage premiums by 34 percent nationwide to the lowest level in 14 years. Medicare health plan premium savings for beneficiaries have totaled $nearly 1.5 billion since 2017.
    • Improved access to tax-free health savings accounts for individuals with chronic conditions.
    • Eliminated costly Obamacare taxes, including the health insurance tax, the medical device tax, and the “Cadillac tax.”
    • Worked with states to create more flexibility and relief from oppressive Obamacare regulations, including reinsurance waivers to help lower premiums.
    • Released legislative principles to end surprise medical billing.
    • Finalized requirements for unprecedented price transparency from hospitals and insurance companies so patients know what the cost is before they receive care.
    • Took action to require that hospitals make the prices they negotiate with insurers publicly available and easily accessible online.
    • Improved patients access to their health data by penalizing hospitals and causing clinicians to lose their incentive payments if they do not comply.
    • Expanded access to telehealth, especially in rural and underserved communities.
    • Increased Medicare payments to rural hospitals to stem a decade of rising closures and deliver enhanced access to care in rural areas.

    Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.

    • Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.
    • Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.
    • Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.
    • Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.
    • Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.
    • Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.
    • Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.
    • Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin.
    • Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.
    • Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.

    Promoted research and innovation in healthcare to ensure that American patients have access to the best treatment in the world.

    • Signed first-ever executive order to affirm that it is the official policy of the United States Government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.
    • Passed Right To Try to give terminally ill patients access to lifesaving cures.
    • Signed an executive order to fight kidney disease with more transplants and better treatment.
    • Signed into law a $1 billion increase in funding for critical Alzheimer’s research.
    • Accelerated medical breakthroughs in genetic treatments for Sickle Cell disease.
    • Finalized the interoperability rules that will give American patients access to their electronic health records on their phones.
    • Initiated an effort to provide $500 million over the next decade to improve pediatric cancer research.
    • Launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America in the next decade.
    • Started a program to provide the HIV prevention drug PrEP to uninsured patients for free.
    • Signed an executive order and awarded new development contracts to modernize the influenza vaccine.

    Protected our Nation’s seniors by safeguarding and strengthening Medicare.

    • Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment.
    • Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse.
    • Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use.
    • Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov.
    • Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance.
    • Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule.
    • Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation.

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    Remaking the Federal Judiciary

    Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.

    • Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.
    • Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.
    • Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.
    • Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.

    Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.

    • Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
    • Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
    • Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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    Achieving a Secure Border

    Secured the Southern Border of the United States.

    • Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall.
    • Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.
    • Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.
    • Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.
    • Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.
    • Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.

    Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.

    • Signed an executive order to strip discretionary Federal grant funding from deadly sanctuary cities.
    • Fully enforced and implemented statutorily authorized “expedited removal” of illegal aliens.
    • The Department of Justice prosecuted a record-breaking number of immigration-related crimes.
    • Used Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to reduce the number of aliens coming from countries whose governments refuse to accept their nationals who were ordered removed from the United States.

    Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.

    • Suspended, via regulation, asylum for aliens who had skipped previous countries where they were eligible for asylum but opted to “forum shop” and continue to the United States.
    • Safeguarded migrant families, and protected migrant safety, by promulgating new regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement.
    • Proposed regulations to end the practice of giving free work permits to illegal aliens lodging meritless asylum claims.
    • Issued “internal relocation” guidance.
    • Cross-trained United States Border Patrol agents to conduct credible fear screenings alongside USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) adjudication personnel to reduce massive backlogs.
    • Streamlined and expedited the asylum hearing process through both the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP).
    • Launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify hundreds of individuals who were fraudulently presenting themselves as family units at the border, oftentimes with trafficking children, in order to ensure child welfare.
    • Improved screening in countries with high overstay rates and reduced visa overstay rates in many of these countries.
    • Removed bureaucratic constraints on United States consular officers that reduced their ability to appropriately vet visa applicants.
    • Worked with Mexico and other regional partners to dismantle the human smuggling networks in our hemisphere that profit from human misery and fuel the border crisis by exploiting vulnerable populations.

    Secured our Nation’s immigration system against criminals and terrorists.

    • Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States.
    • Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions.
    • Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing.
    • 85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement.
    • Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process.
    • Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process.
    • Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals.
    • Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world.

    Protected American workers and taxpayers.

    • Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare.
    • Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations.
    • Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.”
    • Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing.
    • Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible.
    • Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs.
    • Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance.
    • Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.
    • Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States.
    • Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS.

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    Restoring American Leadership Abroad

    Restored America’s leadership in the world and successfully negotiated to ensure our allies pay their fair share for our military protection.

    • Secured a $400 billion increase in defense spending from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies by 2024, and the number of members meeting their minimum obligations more than doubled.
    • Credited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for strengthening NATO.
    • Worked to reform and streamline the United Nations (UN) and reduced spending by $1.3 billion.
    • Allies, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, committed to increase burden-sharing.
    • Protected our Second Amendment rights by announcing the United States will never ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty.
    • Returned 56 hostages and detainees from more than 24 countries.
    • Worked to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region, promoting new investments and expanding American partnerships.

    Advanced peace through strength.

    • Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian Regime.
    • Conducted vigorous enforcement on all sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime its principal source of revenue.
    • First president to meet with a leader of North Korea and the first sitting president to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea.
    • Maintained a maximum pressure campaign and enforced tough sanctions on North Korea while negotiating de-nuclearization, the release of American hostages, and the return of the remains of American heroes.
    • Brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, bolstering peace in the Balkans.
    • Signed the Honk Kong Autonomy Act and ended the United States’ preferential treatment with Hong Kong to hold China accountable for its infringement on the autonomy of Hong Kong.
    • Led allied efforts to defeat the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the international telecommunications system.

    Renewed our cherished friendship and alliance with Israel and took historic action to promote peace in the Middle East.

    • Recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel and quickly moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
    • Acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not inconsistent with international law.
    • Removed the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the group’s blatant anti-Israel bias.
    • Brokered historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Sudan.
    • In addition, the United States negotiated a normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, and recognized Moroccan Sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara, a position with long standing bipartisan support.
    • Brokered a deal for Kosovo to normalize ties and establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
    • Announced that Serbia would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
    • First American president to address an assembly of leaders from more than 50 Muslim nations, and reach an agreement to fight terrorism in all its forms.
    • Established the Etidal Center to combat terrorism in the Middle East in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Government.
    • Announced the Vision for Peace Political Plan – a two-state solution that resolves the risks of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security, and the first time Israel has agreed to a map and a Palestinian state.
    • Released an economic plan to empower the Palestinian people and enhance Palestinian governance through historic private investment.

    Stood up against Communism and Socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

    • Reversed the previous Administration’s disastrous Cuba policy, canceling the sellout deal with the Communist Castro dictatorship.
    • Pledged not to lift sanctions until all political prisoners are freed; freedoms of assembly and expression are respected; all political parties are legalized; and free elections are scheduled.
    • Enacted a new policy aimed at preventing American dollars from funding the Cuban regime, including stricter travel restrictions and restrictions on the importation of Cuban alcohol and tobacco.
    • Implemented a cap on remittances to Cuba.
    • Enabled Americans to file lawsuits against persons and entities that traffic in property confiscated by the Cuban regime.
    • First world leader to recognize Juan Guaido as the Interim President of Venezuela and led a diplomatic coalition against the Socialist Dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
    • Blocked all property of the Venezuelan Government in the jurisdiction of the United States.
    • Cut off the financial resources of the Maduro regime and sanctioned key sectors of the Venezuelan economy exploited by the regime.
    • Brought criminal charges against Nicolas Maduro for his narco-terrorism.
    • Imposed stiff sanctions on the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.
    • Joined together with Mexico and Canada in a successful bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 60 matches to be held in the United States.
    • Won bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

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    Colossal Rebuilding of the Military

    Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.

    • Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.
    • Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.
    • Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.
    • Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.
    • Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.
    • Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

    Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.

    • Defeated 100 percent of ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
    • Freed nearly 8 million civilians from ISIS’ bloodthirsty control, and liberated Mosul, Raqqa, and the final ISIS foothold of Baghuz.
    • Killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.
    • Created the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) in partnership between the United States and its Gulf partners to combat extremist ideology and threats, and target terrorist financial networks, including over 60 terrorist individuals and entities spanning the globe.
    • Twice took decisive military action against the Assad regime in Syria for the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians, including a successful 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles strike.
    • Authorized sanctions against bad actors tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
    • Negotiated an extended ceasefire with Turkey in northeast Syria.

    Addressed gaps in American’s defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.

    • Protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.
    • Took decisive steps to secure our information and communications technology and services supply chain, including unsafe mobile applications.
    • Completed several multi-year nuclear material removal campaigns, securing over 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and significantly reducing global nuclear threats.
    • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
    • Established a whole-of-government strategy addressing the threat posed by China’s malign efforts targeting the United States taxpayer-funded research and development ecosystem.
    • Advanced missile defense capabilities and regional alliances.
    • Bolstered the ability of our allies and partners to defend themselves through the sale of aid and military equipment.
    • Signed the largest arms deal ever, worth nearly $110 billion, with Saudi Arabia.

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    Serving and Protecting Our Veterans

    Reformed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care, choice, and employee accountability.

    • Signed and implemented the VA Mission Act, which made permanent Veterans CHOICE, revolutionized the VA community care system, and delivered quality care closer to home for Veterans.
    • The number of Veterans who say they trust VA services has increased 19 percent to a record 91 percent, an all-time high.
    • Offered same-day emergency mental health care at every VA medical facility, and secured $9.5 billion for mental health services in 2020.
    • Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017, which ensured that veterans could continue to see the doctor of their choice and wouldn’t have to wait for care.
    • During the Trump Administration, millions of veterans have been able to choose a private doctor in their communities.
    • Expanded Veterans’ ability to access telehealth services, including through the “Anywhere to Anywhere” VA healthcare initiative leading to a 1000 percent increase in usage during COVID-19.
    • Signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and removed thousands of VA workers who failed to give our Vets the care they have so richly deserve.
    • Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 and improved the efficiency of the VA, setting record numbers of appeals decisions.
    • Modernized medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense to the VA.
    • Launched a new tool that provides Veterans with online access to average wait times and quality-of-care data.
    • The promised White House VA Hotline has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls.
    • Formed the PREVENTS Task Force to fight the tragedy of Veteran suicide.

    Decreased veteran homelessness, improved education benefits, and achieved record-low veteran unemployment.

    • Signed and implemented the Forever GI Bill, allowing Veterans to use their benefits to get an education at any point in their lives.
    • Eliminated every penny of Federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled.
    • Compared to 2009, 49 percent fewer veterans experienced homelessness nationwide during 2019.
    • Signed and implemented the HAVEN Act to ensure that Veterans who’ve declared bankruptcy don’t lose their disability payments.
    • Helped hundreds of thousands of military service members make the transition from the military to the civilian workforce, and developed programs to support the employment of military spouses.
    • Placed nearly 40,000 homeless veterans into employment through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program.
    • Placed over 600,000 veterans into employment through American Job Center services.
    • Enrolled over 500,000 transitioning service members in over 20,000 Department of Labor employment workshops.
    • Signed an executive order to help Veterans transition seamlessly into the United States Merchant Marine.

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    Making Communities Safer

    Signed into law landmark criminal justice reform.

    • Signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law, the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.
    • Promoted second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.
    • Launched a new “Ready to Work” initiative to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.
    • Awarded $2.2 million to states to expand the use of fidelity bonds, which underwrite companies that hire former prisoners.
    • Reversed decades-old ban on Second Chance Pell programs to provide postsecondary education to individuals who are incarcerated expand their skills and better succeed in the workforce upon re-entry.
    • Awarded over $333 million in Department of Labor grants to nonprofits and local and state governments for reentry projects focused on career development services for justice-involved youth and adults who were formerly incarcerated.

    Unprecedented support for law-enforcement.

    • In 2019, violent crime fell for the third consecutive year.
    • Since 2016, the violent crime rate has declined over 5 percent and the murder rate has decreased by over 7 percent.
    • Launched Operation Legend to combat a surge of violent crime in cities, resulting in more than 5,500 arrests.
    • Deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to Kenosha to stop violence and restore public safety.
    • Provided $1 million to Kenosha law enforcement, nearly $4 million to support small businesses in Kenosha, and provided over $41 million to support law enforcement to the state of Wisconsin.
    • Deployed Federal agents to save the courthouse in Portland from rioters.
    • Signed an executive order outlining ten-year prison sentences for destroying Federal property and monuments.
    • Directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute Federal offenses related to ongoing violence.
    • DOJ provided nearly $400 million for new law enforcement hiring.
    • Endorsed by the 355,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police.
    • Revitalized Project Safe Neighborhoods, which brings together Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials to develop solutions to violent crime.
    • Improved first-responder communications by deploying the FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network, which serves more than 12,000 public safety agencies across the Nation.
    • Established a new commission to evaluate best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting law enforcement officers.
    • Signed the Safe Policing for Safe Communities executive order to incentive local police department reforms in line with law and order.
    • Made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement.
    • Signed an executive order to help prevent violence against law enforcement officers.
    • Secured permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for first responders.

    Implemented strong measures to stem hate crimes, gun violence, and human trafficking.

    • Signed an executive order making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.
    • Launched a centralized website to educate the public about hate crimes and encourage reporting.
    • Signed the Fix NICS Act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.
    • Signed the STOP School Violence Act and created a Commission on School Safety to examine ways to make our schools safer.
    • Launched the Foster Youth to Independence initiative to prevent and end homelessness among young adults under the age of 25 who are in, or have recently left, the foster care system.
    • Signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which tightened criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking.
    • Established a task force to help combat the tragedy of missing or murdered Native American women and girls.
    • Prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation, through a whole of government back by legislation, executive action, and engagement with key industries.
    • Created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.

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    Cherishing Life and Religious Liberty

    Steadfastly supported the sanctity of every human life and worked tirelessly to prevent government funding of abortion.

    • Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, ensuring that taxpayer money is not used to fund abortion globally.
    • Issued a rule preventing Title X taxpayer funding from subsiding the abortion industry.
    • Supported legislation to end late-term abortions.
    • Cut all funding to the United Nations population fund due to the fund’s support for coercive abortion and forced sterilization.
    • Signed legislation overturning the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs.
    • Fully enforced the requirement that taxpayer dollars do not support abortion coverage in Obamacare exchange plans.
    • Stopped the Federal funding of fetal tissue research.
    • Worked to protect healthcare entities and individuals’ conscience rights – ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.
    • Issued an executive order reinforcing requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who are in need of emergency medical care—regardless of prematurity or disability.
    • Led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion and committing to protecting women’s health.
    • First president in history to attend the March for Life.

    Stood up for religious liberty in the United States and around the world.

    • Protected the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, teachers, and groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.
    • First president to convene a meeting at the United Nations to end religious persecution.
    • Established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
    • Stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with pastors’ right to speak their minds.
    • Reversed the previous administration’s policy that prevented the government from providing disaster relief to religious organizations.
    • Protected faith-based adoption and foster care providers, ensuring they can continue to serve their communities while following the teachings of their faith.
    • Reduced burdensome barriers to ensure Native Americans are free to keep spiritually and culturally significant eagle feathers found on their tribal lands.
    • Took action to ensure Federal employees can take paid time off work to observe religious holy days.
    • Signed legislation to assist religious and ethnic groups targeted by ISIS for mass murder and genocide in Syria and Iraq.
    • Directed American assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs.
    • Launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance – the first-ever alliance devoted to confronting religious persecution around the world.
    • Appointed a Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
    • Imposed restrictions on certain Chinese officials, internal security units, and companies for their complicity in the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
    • Issued an executive order to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.

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    Safeguarding the Environment

    Took strong action to protect the environment and ensure clean air and clean water.

    • Took action to protect vulnerable Americans from being exposed to lead and copper in drinking water and finalized a rule protecting children from lead-based paint hazards.
    • Invested over $38 billion in clean water infrastructure.
    • In 2019, America achieved the largest decline in carbon emissions of any country on earth. Since withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.
    • American levels of particulate matter – one of the main measures of air pollution – are approximately five times lower than the global average.
    • Between 2017 and 2019, the air became 7 percent cleaner – indicated by a steep drop in the combined emissions of criteria pollutants.
    • Led the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, having cut energy-related CO2 emissions by 12 percent from 2005 to 2018 while the rest of the world increased emissions by 24 percent.
    • In FY 2019 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up more major pollution sites than any year in nearly two decades.
    • The EPA delivered $300 million in Brownfields grants directly to communities most in need including investment in 118 Opportunity Zones.
    • Placed a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
    • Restored public access to Federal land at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
    • Recovered more endangered or threatened species than any other administration in its first term.

    Secured agreements and signed legislation to protect the environment and preserve our Nation’s abundant national resources.

    • The USMCA guarantees the strongest environmental protections of any trade agreement in history.
    • Signed the Save Our Seas Act to protect our environment from foreign nations that litter our oceans with debris and developed the first-ever Federal strategic plan to address marine litter.
    • Signed the Great American Outdoors Act, securing the single largest investment in America’s National Parks and public lands in history.
    • Signed the largest public lands legislation in a decade, designating 1.3 million new acres of wilderness.
    • Signed a historic executive order promoting much more active forest management to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
    • Opened and expanded access to over 4 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing.
    • Joined the One Trillion Trees Initiative to plant, conserve, and restore trees in America and around the world.
    • Delivered infrastructure upgrades and investments for numerous projects, including over half a billion dollars to fix the Herbert Hoover Dike and expanding funding for Everglades restoration by 55 percent.

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    Expanding Educational Opportunity

    Fought tirelessly to give every American access to the best possible education.

    • The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded School Choice, allowing parents to use up to $10,000 from a 529 education savings account to cover K-12 tuition costs at the public, private, or religious school of their choice.
    • Launched a new pro-American lesson plan for students called the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education.
    • Prohibited the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government.
    • Established the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.
    • Called on Congress to pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to expand education options for 1 million students of all economic backgrounds.
    • Signed legislation reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.
    • Issued updated guidance making clear that the First Amendment right to Free Exercise of Religion does not end at the door to a public school.

    Took action to promote technical education.

    • Signed into law the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which provides over 13 million students with high-quality vocational education and extends more than $1.3 billion each year to states for critical workforce development programs.
    • Signed the INSPIRE Act which encouraged NASA to have more women and girls participate in STEM and seek careers in aerospace.
    • Allocated no less than $200 million each year in grants to prioritize women and minorities in STEM and computer science education.

    Drastically reformed and modernized our educational system to restore local control and promote fairness.

    • Restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.
    • Signed an executive order that ensures public universities protect First Amendment rights or they will risk losing funding, addresses student debt by requiring colleges to share a portion of the financial risk, and increases transparency by requiring universities to disclose information about the value of potential educational programs.
    • Issued a rule strengthening Title IX protections for survivors of sexual misconduct in schools, and that – for the first time in history – codifies that sexual harassment is prohibited under Title IX.
    • Negotiated historic bipartisan agreement on new higher education rules to increase innovation and lower costs by reforming accreditation, state authorization, distance education, competency-based education, credit hour, religious liberty, and TEACH Grants.

    Prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

    • Moved the Federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative back to the White House.
    • Signed into law the FUTURE Act, making permanent $255 million in annual funding for HBCUs and increasing funding for the Federal Pell Grant program.
    • Signed legislation that included more than $100 million for scholarships, research, and centers of excellence at HBCU land-grant institutions.
    • Fully forgave $322 million in disaster loans to four HBCUs in 2018, so they could fully focus on educating their students.
    • Enabled faith-based HBCUs to enjoy equal access to Federal support.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Combatting the Opioid Crisis

    Brought unprecedented attention and support to combat the opioid crisis.

    • Declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.
    • Secured a record $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic.
    • Signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, the largest-ever legislative effort to address a drug crisis in our Nation’s history.
    • Launched the Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand in order to confront the many causes fueling the drug crisis.
    • The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a record $9 billion in grants to expand access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services to States and local communities.
    • Passed the CRIB Act, allowing Medicaid to help mothers and their babies who are born physically dependent on opioids by covering their care in residential pediatric recovery facilities.
    • Distributed $1 billion in grants for addiction prevention and treatment.
    • Announced a Safer Prescriber Plan that seeks to decrease the amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America by one third within three years.
    • Reduced the total amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America.
    • Expanded access to medication-assisted treatment and life-saving Naloxone.
    • Launched FindTreatment.gov, a tool to find help for substance abuse.
    • Drug overdose deaths fell nationwide in 2018 for the first time in nearly three decades.
    • Launched the Drug-Impaired Driving Initiative to work with local law enforcement and the driving public at large to increase awareness.
    • Launched a nationwide public ad campaign on youth opioid abuse that reached 58 percent of young adults in America.
    • Since 2016, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment.
    • Approved 29 state Medicaid demonstrations to improve access to opioid use disorder treatment, including new flexibility to cover inpatient and residential treatment.
    • Approved nearly $200 million in grants to address the opioid crisis in severely affected communities and to reintegrate workers in recovery back into the workforce.

    Took action to seize illegal drugs and punish those preying on innocent Americans.

    • In FY 2019, ICE HSI seized 12,466 pounds of opioids including 3,688 pounds of fentanyl, an increase of 35 percent from FY 2018.
    • Seized tens of thousands of kilograms of heroin and thousands of kilograms of fentanyl since 2017.
    • The Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted more fentanyl traffickers than ever before, dismantled 3,000 drug trafficking organizations, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 105,000 Americans.
    • DOJ charged more than 65 defendants collectively responsible for distributing over 45 million opioid pills.
    • Brought kingpin designations against traffickers operating in China, India, Mexico, and more who have played a role in the epidemic in America.
    • Indicted major Chinese drug traffickers for distributing fentanyl in the U.S for the first time ever, and convinced China to enact strict regulations to control the production and sale of fentanyl.

    If I have time, I’d like to go through this list to touch on the highlights of what the Trump Administration got right or wrong, what he accomplished that a Democratic Administration wou8ldn’t have, and what he accomplished that another Republican presidential admistration would or wouldn’t have.

    China Perfidy Roundup for December 31, 2020

    Thursday, December 31st, 2020

    We started the year with China lying about the deadly virus that was about to sweep the world, so let’s end the year with a China news roundup:

  • There was a major leak of a database containing the names of communist Chinese Party members:

    A major leak containing a register with the details of nearly two million CCP members has occurred – exposing members who are now working all over the world, while also lifting the lid on how the party operates under Xi Jinping, says Sharri Markson.

    Ms Markson said the leak is a register with the details of Communist Party members, including their names, party position, birthday, national ID number and ethnicity.

    “It is believed to be the first leak of its kind in the world,” the Sky News host said.

    “What’s amazing about this database is not just that it exposes people who are members of the communist party, and who are now living and working all over the world, from Australia to the US to the UK,” Ms Markson said.

    “But it’s amazing because it lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping”.

    Ms Markson said the leak demonstrates party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies and even inside government agencies.

    “Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members – who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” she said.

    “Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies”.

    I’ve poked around a bit to find a copy of that database, but all I could locate was an excerpt featuring the first 5,000 names or so. If anyone knows where I can find the full list, let me know in the comments.

  • Here’s a story so strange I wanted to turn it into a separate post, but details remain too murky: Fabless chip designer Arm Holdings fired the head of its Chinese business unit, but he’s refusing to leave:

    Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that’s becoming a test of Beijing’s willingness to protect foreign investment in the world’s second-largest economy.

    The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated.

    Wu has hired his own security and won’t let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He’s refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named.

    Wu is “propagating false information and creating a culture of fear and confusion among Arm China employees,” the U.K.-based company said in a statement. “Allen’s focus on his own self-preservation has also put China semiconductor innovation at risk as he has attempted to block the critical communication and support our China partners require from Arm for ongoing and future chip designs.”

    Arm China disputed the claims in an emailed response to queries, adding that Wu was open to talks and there have been no disruptions in business engagement between Arm Ltd. and its China clients.China is the largest market for semiconductors and the U.K. firm relies on Arm China to conduct business with local customers, including Huawei Technologies Co. The country accounts for a large proportion of the company’s global revenue and resolving the conflict will be crucial to SoftBank’s reported plans to sell Arm, a lynchpin in the global smartphone and computing industry that the Japanese firm bought for $32 billion in 2016.

    In early June, Arm China’s board – which includes representatives from Arm Ltd. and Chinese investors – ousted Wu for setting up an investing firm that competes with its own businesses there. He refused to accept the decision, saying it was invalid and has remained in control at Arm China’s headquarters in Shenzhen.

    The intricacies of Chinese rules confer an advantage to Wu as the holder of key registration documents. As the legal representative of Arm China, Wu holds the company’s registration documents and the company seal, or stamp. Changing the legal representative requires taking possession of the company stamp — something Wu has refused to give up.

  • Not only has Wu refused to step down, but he’s holding up Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm.
  • It’s time for the west to give up its delusions about China:

    It was once an accepted truth that China’s increased economic trade and participation in international bodies such as the World Trade Organization would benefit everyone.

    China and its citizens would benefit through the jobs and wealth earned from their vast export market. Americans and Europeans would benefit from access to an ever-greater array of ever-cheaper goods. Asian, African, and other American nations would benefit from access to both sides of this market and the incentive to replicate a version of China’s export model. And the world’s democracies, the cornerstones of the post-Cold War international order, would benefit from China’s recognition that it would gain more by abiding the rules of the game than by breaking them.

    To borrow from Shakespeare, “the jest of the truth savors but of shallow wit, now that thousands weep more than did celebrate it.”

    The weeping is real. Each week brings us increasingly horrific stories of the suffering endured by China’s already impoverished Uighur population. More than 2 million of these innocent citizens have been forced into concentration camps over the past decade. They have been indoctrinated to believe that there is no ideology of value save that of the Communist Party and its god-emperor Xi Jinping. Some have been forcibly sterilized, others sent far from their homes and families. As reported just this month, hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are forced into annual servitude as cotton pickers.

    There’s a defining lesson here. China was supposed to be a top partner to the liberal international order. Instead, it is now taking inspiration from the Antebellum South’s slave economy, using forced labor in support of an unaccountable elite. Even were it not beholden to China, Hollywood could not invent a better example than the Uighurs’ plight to expose the lie that China’s economic development would usher in a kinder and gentler policy on its part.

    Of course, Hollywood’s pathetic deference to Beijing isn’t a solitary American corporate story. It is the story. Instead of markets leading to more economic and political freedom in China, they have led major U.S. corporations to self-censor in order to gain access to Chinese consumers and their cheap labor. As with the NBA, which rightly cares a great deal about black lives but apparently not one iota about Uighur lives, major corporations such as Disney, Dell, and Walmart deal with China even if they must do so with terrible strings attached.

    Beijing is explicit in its expectation that trade opportunities come with the price of silent acquiescence. Where the Chinese Communist Party signs treaties — whether the rules of the WTO, promises on intellectual property regimes, or carbon emissions targets — its pledges must be greeted only with applause from the West, never with any enforcement or demands that Xi be held to his word.

  • “FCC orders US telecom companies to rip out Huawei equipment“:

    US carriers and telecommunications companies receiving Universal Service funding are now required to remove all Huawei technology, by order of the federal government.

    The US Federal Communications Commission has ordered certain carriers to “rip and replace” all equipment produced by Huawei. It follows continuing investigations into claims that Huawei represents a threat to national security, and Huawei’s application for a review of a similar ruling by the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau in June.

    “A laundry list of evidence before us compels this result,” said FCC chairman Ajit Pal in a statement. “But to summarize some of the main points, Huawei has a long and well-documented history of close ties to the Chinese military and intelligence communities, as well as the Chinese Communist Party, at every level of the company— all the way up to its founder.”

    “Huawei is subject to sweeping Chinese intelligence laws compelling Huawei’s assistance and cooperation with Chinese intelligence services and forbidding the disclosure of that assistance,” he continued. “Moreover, the concerns about Huawei aren’t just hypothetical: Independent entities have identified numerous security vulnerabilities in Huawei equipment and found it to be less secure than that of other companies— perhaps deliberately so.”

  • Speaking of crackdowns, President Donald Trump’s administration has added more Chinese companies to the blacklist:

    The Trump administration is poised to add China’s top chipmaker SMIC and national offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, Reuters reported citing a document and sources, curbing their access to U.S. investors and escalating tensions with Beijing.

    The latest crackdown comes after a report from Reuters earlier this month that the Department of Defense (DOD) was planning to designate four more Chinese companies as owned or controlled by the Chinese military, bringing the number of Chinese companies affected to 35. A recent executive order issued by President Donald Trump would prevent U.S. investors from buying securities of the listed firms starting late next year.

    It was not immediately clear when the new tranche, would be published in the Federal Register. But the list comprises China Construction Technology Co Ltd and China International Engineering Consulting Corp, in addition to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Reuters reported.

  • China tries to modernize its very non-modern army.

    On paper the Chinese army looks pretty impressive, with 78 combat brigades and nearly as many specialized brigades. Over the last decade the Chinese army has been converting its divisions to brigades, many of them independent brigades like the American Brigade combat teams. That conversion is still underway, although by now nearly all the regiments that formerly comprised the major subunits of divisions have been converted to brigades.

    The task of turning all those new brigades into well-equipped and trained ones is still underway. There are three types of combat brigades. The most potent is the heavy brigade, each with about a hundred tanks and dozens of tracked IFVs (infantry fighting vehicles) plus detachments of engineers and other specialists. The problem with these heavy brigades is that not all of them have the latest tanks. China has not built enough of its most modern tank to replace all the older models. As more of the latest tank enter service heavy brigades receive them and have to go through months of training to learn how to get the most out of them.

    Snip.

    The major problem with the army is that all the elite units (special operations and airborne) as well as key units stationed in the capital and a few other places have few conscripts. Nearly all the conscripts are assigned to the combat brigades and the support brigades assigned to each of the 13 Group Armies. Units with conscripts spend about half the year training the new ones and if there is a war these units would, half the time, have a large portion of their troops poorly trained and not fully integrated into the unit. This is a major problem for combat units that depend on well-trained troops who have been with their units long enough for commanders to know what they can get out of them.

    (Previously.)

  • “Chinese Increasing Nuclear Submarine Shipyard Capacity.”

    As China pushes to become a blue-water power, nuclear-powered submarines are critically important to Beijing’s plan. Historically the Chinese Navy’s (PLAN) nuclear-powered submarine fleet has been constrained by its limited construction capacity. There is only one shipyard in the country up to the task. But that yard has been undergoing a massive enlargement. And now, recent satellite imagery suggests an additional capacity expansion.

    China’s nuclear-powered submarine fleet was already expected to get much larger in the coming years. This latest development suggests that China could pump out submarines at an even greater rate.

    Just how many nuclear submarines China will build over the next ten years is a hot topic. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) recently forecast China’s submarine fleet to grow by six nuclear-powered attack submarines by 2030. Other observers, such as retired Capt. James Fanell who was Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet, place their estimates even higher.

  • “Chinese general says Korean War shows how to defeat America“:

    A senior Chinese People’s Liberation Army officer, Lt. Gen. He Lei, penned an article explaining why China’s Korean War experience should guide its modern military strategy toward the United States.

    The executive officer of the PLA’s Academy of Military Science, He is a known hard-liner on Taiwan and the U.S. In his present assignment, the general is responsible for training PLA officers and strategy development. His words carry weight both for what they say about evolving PLA doctrine and their influence on Beijing’s Central Military Commission. His arguments are certainly forward-leaning, referencing the PLA’s rising expectation that it will have to fight a near-term war with either the U.S., Taiwan, or both.

    Beginning with a creative history of the Korean War, He explains that Mao Zedong’s deployment of the PLA against the U.S. military in North Korea shattered “the myth that U.S. imperialism is invincible.” Here, we see a presentation of the U.S. military as a force that can be both contested and defeated. The centrality of the Korean War to the Chinese military psyche takes on significant importance in the context of three factors. First, the war is seen as a necessary defense of the motherland against a great external threat. Second, the PLA has limited post-Korean War experience of major conflict. Third, China views the outcome of that war as being broadly in its favor. Taken together, He thus uses the Korean War to reinforce the idea that China can take on a more powerful foe and triumph.

    China’s military might be shocked to find America’s military a wee bit more advanced and prepared than it was in 1950…

  • “China forced hundreds of thousands of children in Xinjiang, where the majority of the population belongs to the ethnic Uyghur minority, into ‘boarding schools‘ as they lost their parents to communist concentration camps.”
  • Uighurs aren’t the only ones, with Tibetans also sent to concentration camps:

    More than half a million Tibetan farmers and pastoralists have been placed in military training facilities to be turned into wage workers controlled by the authorities. This model replicates the one used in Xinjiang internment camps where more than a million Uyghur Muslims are imprisoned and indoctrinated.

    A study by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute shows that the Chinese regime runs 380 “concentration camps” in the Xinjiang autonomous region. According to the Chinese Communist Party, Tibetans are a “lazy people” who need to be reprogrammed. To this end, Chinese leaders want to reduce the “negative influence” of the Buddhist religion.

    First of a three-part series. Second Part. Third part.

  • “Uighurs fear deportation as China ratifies extradition treaty with Turkey.”
  • “FBI Warns Law Enforcement That China Is Targeting United States Citizens“:

    The FBI is warning law-enforcement agencies to beware of cooperating with a Chinese government campaign to coerce U.S. residents to return to China to face criminal charges, according to a counterintelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.

    The bulletin comes after eight people, including a former New York Police Department officer, were indicted on charges of acting as illegal agents for Beijing.

    “State and local public safety personnel should be aware that Chinese Government officials, such as diplomats and officials with China’s primary law enforcement agency, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), may seek assistance to obtain sensitive US law enforcement or non-public personally identifiable information on individuals of interest,” which is marked for official use only and was distributed to law enforcement agencies around the country.

    The warning concerns China’s long-standing policy of reaching beyond its borders to target people it accuses of financial crimes, even if they are permanently living abroad. The repatriations, often coerced by blackmail or threats, are part of Beijing’s anti-corruption campaign called Fox Hunt.

    There has been an increasing number of allegations that China has coerced, even kidnapped, its citizens living abroad, and that it targets political dissidents as well as those accused of financial crimes.

  • How Xi Jinping has cloaked himself with the mandate of a modern emperor:

    When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the conventional wisdom seems to be that the emergence of the virus was mishandled and the Communist government has yet to be transparent about it, but that the spread was arrested through aggressive public-health practices and the economy has rebounded.

    As usual with the PRC, the reality is more complex. In fact, recent signs of tension between President Xi Jinping and other leaders, notably Premier Li Keqiang, indicate the additional impact the pandemic had on an underlying soft economy and the country’s growing isolation because of Beijing’s poor handling of the crisis and other factors.

    Snip.

    In the past few years, Xi has centralized his personal authority to a degree not seen in a Chinese leader since Chairman Mao. In 2017, Xi took control of the country’s military and often appears in public in a military uniform. He is, in effect, the head of the National Security Council, the head of the foreign policy apparatus, and of multiple economic commissions. In recent public appearances, the state news agency Xinhua has referred to him as “People’s Leader.” Can “Chairman Xi” be far off? In additional to title inflation, in 2018, he imposed constitutional changes on the National People’s Congress that removed a term limit preventing him from seeking a third term in 2023. Xi’s moves and power consolidation mean he is responsible and accountable for both the good and the bad. And lately, there’s been far more bad than good.

    Starting with the economy: However the government may have controlled the pandemic, the economy remains weak. Economic growth prior to the pandemic — according to China watchers skeptical of government numbers — was probably flat or negative, notwithstanding official statistics that had it closer to 6 percent. Government at every level and households had combined debt of about 300 percent of GDP. U.S. debt/GDP even after trillions in coronavirus relief spending is less than half China’s level, which leaves fewer levers for Beijing to pull to help stimulate the economy.

    While the U.S. Federal Reserve and Congress have injected more than $6 trillion into the economy through massive purchases across many asset classes, the People’s Bank of China balance sheet has remained flat this year. The U.S. Congress provided about $630 billion in direct support to small businesses, compared with less than one-tenth that amount the PRC made available to small businesses in China. Retail sales in China for each month of 2020 are down compared with the same month the year prior. The real data are certainly worse than what the government discloses. In the U.S., retail sales in July were at all-time highs, eclipsing their pre-pandemic levels. According to economist Carlos Casanove at French insurer Coface, the PRC “recovery narrative has been overplayed.”

    This is contributing to the tension between Xi and Li. At a press conference in May, the prime minister acknowledged that 600 million people in China — about half the population — subsist on 1000 yuan ($140) a month. This number includes the estimates of 80 million who lost work due to the virus who may have no income and no meaningful social safety net in China. Li’s data track with World Bank data which show a vast disparity in income between the urban elite and the mostly poor rural population. Even so, his comments were out of step with other government-touted figures, including a central bank survey in April of 30,000 urban residents who have an average of nearly half a million dollars in household assets. This figure generated so much controversy that the central bank withdrew it.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Chinese and European Union officials have agreed to an economic investment deal agreement despite international outrage over the communist regime’s human rights abuses and President-elect Joe Biden’s desire to coordinate an allied posture toward Beijing.” Also, get this: “‘This agreement will uphold our interests & promotes our core values,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen insisted Wednesday. ‘It provides us a lever to eradicate forced labour.'” Translation: “We know China engages in slave labor and we’re going to do business with it anyway, and just pretend we care about eliminating it.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Nigel Farage: China Is Licking Its Chops at the Thought of President Joe Biden:

    The Guardian newspaper in London had an exclusive story in which Victor Zhang, the vice president of Huawei, stated that in light of Trump’s defeat, Britain should review its decision to ban the telecoms giant from its 5G network. Zhang warned that this decision would have economic repercussions for Britain, adding: “As a global company, we want to work with governments to ensure they have the policies to secure growth. The decision was a political one motivated by U.S. perceptions of Huawei, and not those of the U.K. This is not really motivated by security, but about a trade war between the U.S. and China.”

    Or consider the fact that this year, some British politicians have shown a certain amount of moral grit by expressing concerns about new authoritarian security laws in Hong Kong and China’s persecution of its Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang. How have the Chinese reacted? This week, Fang Wenjian, chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the U.K. and the Bank of China’s boss, issued another menacing warning. The Sunday Times and City A.M. have both published stories linking him to the threat that any decline in U.K.-China relations could force some Chinese firms out of the U.K. In other words: “Don’t criticize China’s abysmal human rights record, or you risk losing our business.”

    Alarms bells are also ringing because of Citiking International, a Chinese-backed private equity firm with offices around the world and, it has been reported, possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. It is trying to buy Eclipse Aerospace, a small firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that employs 65 people. According to Defense News, Eclipse Aerospace produces “very light jets” that are used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Defense News states that its planes feature “sophisticated avionics, engines (originally designed for cruise missiles) and a full authority digital engine control system that all contain sensitive national security design information.” Everybody should be deeply worried about the Chinese having access to this sensitive technology, for obvious reasons.

    Snip.

    The fact is, China has ruined the world in 2020 by its reckless handling of COVID-19. For this, it ought to pay very heavy reparations. It will not. Instead, the reverse is happening. China’s economy is powering ahead, and its leaders are bullying weaker Western nations. With Trump all but gone from the White House, and faltering Joe Biden preparing to move in, it now looks as though China’s quest for world domination is back on track. What a calamity.

  • “Apple’s longtime supplier accused of using forced labor in China.” “New documents show Lens Technology, which makes iPhone glass and is owned by China’s richest woman, received Uighur Muslim laborers transferred from Xinjiang.”

    One of the oldest and most well-known iPhone suppliers has been accused of using forced Muslim labor in its factories, according to documents uncovered by a human rights group, adding new scrutiny to Apple’s human rights record in China.

    The documents, discovered by the Tech Transparency Project and shared exclusively with The Washington Post, detail how thousands of Uighur workers from the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang were sent to work for Lens Technology. Lens also supplies Amazon and Tesla, according to its annual report.

    Lens Technology is one of at least five companies connected to Apple’s supply chain that have now been linked to alleged forced labor from the Xinjiang region, according to human rights groups. Lens Technology stands out from other Apple component suppliers because of its high-profile founder and long, well-documented history going back to the early days of the iPhone.

  • Newt Gingrich: “Mark Kelly and Hunter Biden are just small (albeit important) examples of the massive effort by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to infiltrate, influence and ultimately dominate the American economy and culture.”
  • “California’s Highest-Paid Govt Employee Worked for Org Tied to Chinese Espionage.”

    Meng Yu, former chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), received more than $1.7 million in total pay and benefits in 2019, according to the latest financial disclosures obtained by Transparent California, a taxpayer watchdog group. Under Meng’s leadership the pension fund, which covers two million members in the retirement system and 1.5 million members under its health program, has been subject to federal inquiries into its investments in Chinese government entities.

    Meng took the lead at the pension fund after China’s Thousand Talents Program recruited him to serve as the deputy CIO of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), a state-controlled entity. The FBI considers the Thousand Talents Program an example of “China’s non-traditional espionage against the United States” that seeks to recruit people to transfer U.S. trade secrets and taxpayer-funded research into the hands of the Chinese government. Meng told the propaganda outlet People’s Daily that he worked for SAFE out of patriotic commitment to “the motherland.”

  • “State Department Begins Xinjiang Genocide Determination Review.” Good.
  • China and Iran start drilling in giant Persian Gulf gas field.
  • “A China-Linked Group Repurposed Hacking Team’s Stealthy Spyware….The tool attacks a device’s UEFI firmware—which makes it especially hard to detect and destroy.”

    When a hacking organization’s secret tools are stolen and dumped online for anyone to pick up and repurpose, the consequences can roil the globe. Now one new discovery shows how long those effects can persist. Five years after the notorious spy contractor Hacking Team had its code leaked online, a customized version of one of its stealthiest spyware samples has shown up in the hands of possibly Chinese-speaking hackers.

    At an online version of the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week, researchers Mark Lechtik and Igor Kuznetsov plan to present their findings about that mysterious malware sample, which they detected on the PCs of two of Kaspersky’s customers earlier this year.1 The malware is particularly unusual—and disturbing—because it’s designed to alter a target computer’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, the firmware that is used to load the computer’s operating system. Because the UEFI sits on a chip on the computer’s motherboard outside of its hard drive, infections can persist even if a computer’s entire hard drive is wiped or its operating system is reinstalled, making it far harder to detect or disinfect than normal malware.

    The malware the Kaspersky researchers discovered uses its UEFI foothold to plant a second, more traditional piece of spyware on the computer’s hard drive, a unique piece of code Kaspersky has called MosaicRegressor. But even if that second-stage payload is discovered and wiped, the UEFI remains infected and can simply deploy it again. “Even if you would take the physical disk out and replace it with a new one, the malware will keep reappearing,” says Lechtik, who along with Kuznetsov works as a researcher on Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team. “So I think to date, it’s the most persistent method of having malware on your device, which is why it is so dangerous.”

  • The Minyak Lhagang Lithium Mine poisoned the Lichu River in Tibet.

    On 4 May 2016, a sudden mass death of fish in the Lichu River in Minyak Lhagang, Dartsedo County in Karze Prefecture brought hundreds of local Tibetans out on the street, protesting against a lithium mining company (Ronda Lithium Co Ltd) that released mine waste into the Lichu River, a tributary of Nakchu/Yalong river, the biggest river that merges with Yangtse downstream.

    Yet another case of contaminated mine waste released into Tibetan rivers by a Chinese mining company clearly contradicts Beijing’s call for Green Development in their 13th Five Year plan. In recent years, there have been an increase in the number of cases of environmental degradation caused by Chinese mining companies in Tibet, resulting in more than 20 large scale mining-related protests since 2009.

  • China is also repressing Chinese Jews. I was unaware that Kaifeng, Henan, is home to a Jewish community dating back to the 9th century.
  • Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan sentenced to four years in prison for telling the truth about the Wuhan coronavirus.
  • Speaking of which: “As the World Health Organization and other China puppets struggle to assemble a ‘natural origin’ theory for COVID-19, the CCP has been going to great lengths to quash non-sanctioned investigations that may instead point to a lab escape from research facilities which made international headlines in 2015 for dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ research – by which they were manipulating coronaviruses to better infect humans.”
  • More on the same subject:

    More than a year since the first known person was infected with the coronavirus, an AP investigation shows the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.

    The government is handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to scientists researching the virus’ origins in southern China and affiliated with the military, the AP has found. But it is monitoring their findings and mandating that the publication of any data or research must be approved by a new task force managed by China’s cabinet, under direct orders from President Xi Jinping, according to internal documents obtained by the AP. A rare leak from within the government, the dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected: The clampdown comes from the top.

    As a result, very little has been made public. Authorities are severely limiting information and impeding cooperation with international scientists.

  • “All Major Western Media Outlets Take ‘Private Dinners’, ‘Sponsored Trips’ from Chinese Communist Propaganda Front:

    A host of corporate media outlets including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC have participated in private dinners and sponsored trips with the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a Chinese Communist Party-funded group seeking to garner “favorable coverage” and “disseminate positive messages” regarding China, The National Pulse can reveal.

    Other outlets involved in the propaganda operation include Forbes, the Financial Times, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC News, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, AFP, TIME magazine, LA Times, The Hill, BBC, and The Atlantic.

    The relationship is revealed in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings, which reveal a relationship spanning over a decade between establishment media outlets and the China–United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Columbia failed to disclose $1 million in funding from Chinese sources.”
  • In very-much related news: “Columbia president advocates softer China approach amid questions over foreign gifts”:

    The president of Columbia University is asking Joe Biden to end the monitoring of foreign-born students, especially those who are ethnically Chinese.

    He characterized such monitoring as “paranoia.”

    Columbia President Lee Bollinger issued the letter on December 3 as part of a broader statement asking Biden to “End the Trump Administration’s Assault on the International Exchange of Ideas.” In 2019, Bollinger wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning that he would not “start spying” on foreign students.

    Won’t someone please think of the plight Ivy league university presidents desperate to keep sucking China’s teat?

  • Speaking of which: “14 profs busted for China connections in 2020.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “How The Chinese Use Illegal Online Gambling And Tether To Launder Over $1 Trillion Yuan.” ‘Chinese citizens launder as much as $153 billion per year with the help of online gambling and such cryptocurrency as tether, which has long been rumored to be a key driver of upside into bitcoin.”
  • Here’s an interview with “Spengler” AKA David P. Goldman on why you can’t be China’s friend. I think that a lot of his judgments are suspect, but there is a lot of interesting information in it worth chewing over.

    Huawei very much is the spearhead, because in the Chinese model of economic expansion and the development of world economic power, broadband is the opener to everything else.

    It’s a company with a lot of very talented people. Ten years ago – if you asked people, “What Chinese products do you buy?” – you wouldn’t mention a single brand name. But everyone now knows Huawei. They produce the world’s best smartphones. They certainly dominate 5G internet. But Huawei is not a Chinese company. It is an imperial company.

    The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others. Fifty percent of their engineers are foreign. They bankrupted their competition and hired their talent. They have 50,000 foreign employees, and a very disproportionate amount of their research and development (R&D) is conducted by foreign employees.

    I’ve seen this personally. I worked for several years as an investment banker in Hong Kong for a Chinese-owned boutique. During that time, I collaborated with people from Huawei. I introduced them to foreign governments. Huawei was very clear about its objectives. They’d tell, for example, the government of Mexico, “Let us build a national broadband network. Once you get broadband, you get e-commerce and e-finance, and then we’ll supply the logistics and the financing for that, and we’ll integrate you into the world market.”

    They’ve become one of the most connected societies on earth. China has, by far, the highest percentage of e-commerce of any society in the world. Electronic payment systems and electronic banking are much more advanced there than anywhere else.

    Snip.

    China has a set of weak spots. First, they’ve got a very rapidly aging population. Like all countries with aging populations, they need to export capital and employ young people and other countries to pay for the pensions of their own people. Germany does this, too. That’s part of the motivation for China’s strategy. They will have an enormous burden supporting the aged in the future. They’re hoping to deal with that through automation, through more efficient health care.

    Their biggest problem is the ambitions of their young people. The Chinese created a generation of which 10 million people each year take the gaokao (university) exam. A third of them study engineering. They expect opportunities.

    If China loses its edge in technology, if they fall behind the West, if the Communist Party is seen to have failed in competing with the West, I think that will be a significant threat to its power.

    Worth reading, even if you take it with several grains of salt.

  • If I missed any China news, feel free to share in the comments.

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    LinkSwarm for December 11, 2020

    Friday, December 11th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Democrats dance to China’s tune, the media suddenly discover that Hunter Biden is covered in a thick coat of industrial-grade sleaze, California continues to destroy its economy, and Elon Musk moves to Texas.

  • Kurt Schlichter: The Democrats are literally in bed with the Chinese.

    The most shocking thing about the recent news story that flatulent Russiagate hoaxer and American-nuking enthusiast Rep. Eric Swalwell was caught intertwined with a Chinese honey pot is…well, actually nothing about it is shocking. This is totally on-brand for the Dems and especially this particular clown. It’s not clear how far he got with this Democrat-diddling doxie, but the best case for Swalwell is that he was a fool who couldn’t see how unlikely it was for a DC 8 (and real world 5) to want anything to do with him other than as a mark. The worst case is that he eagerly betrayed his country for a roll in the rice with this Beijing bimbo.

    Either way, he’s a disgrace.

    But this singularly unaccomplished punch-line, this aspiring Beto without the hype or substance (Swalwell’s status as a furry is unknown, but I have my suspicions), is all too representative of his garbage party. The fact is that Red China is delighted by the opportunity to get back to business as usual with a Democrat administration – and in the case of a potential President Biden*, that’s literally business as usual. The garbage media didn’t think his crack-huffing, loser spawn being owned by Chinese intel –you think they don’t have tape of him living out his X-rated video of David Bowie’s 80s hit?– was significant enough to tell us about. But then, like the rest of the establishment, the media’s corporate owners are all wrapped up with the Chi-Coms. When’s the last time you saw Hollywood take a stand against the Chinese commies? That would be about the last time you saw Richard Gere on the big screen, since his career died when he did a movie pointing out their oppression of Tibet. Go look on Netflix or wherever – there’s plenty of stupid woke trash about how America sucks, but nobody talks about the big Red Panda in the room. The corporations know who their real boss is.

    And, as Tucker pointed out in a great monologue, the Establishment is all-in on catering to the commies. It is bought and paid for, owned and happy, and dedicated to selling you out. And a President Biden*, in the event he is inaugurated, will happily continue the fire sale of American physical, intellectual, and moral assets to the reds.

  • “If Voters Had Known About 8 Stories Media Ignored, Trump Would Have Won.” Well, that’s why they ignored them…
  • Speaking of which, our media elites have suddenly discovered that the Hunter Biden corruption story was true. Of course they knew it was true all along, they just suppressed it until they could drag Joe Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line. (And if you somehow missed the Hunter Biden story, here’s the archive.)
  • More on the same theme.
  • Illegal alien charged in Houston human trafficking case.
  • Lockdowns don’t work:

  • More on that subject:

  • Judge rules Los Angeles County acted arbitrarily with an outdoor dining ban. “By failing to weigh the benefits of an outdoor dining restriction against its costs, the county acted arbitrarily and its decision lacks a rational relationship to a legitimate end,” Superior Court Judge James Chalfant wrote in a tentative ruling.”
  • San Francisco residents really hate that golden goose:

    When Chirag Bhakta saw a headline recently that said tech workers were fleeing San Francisco, he had a quick reaction: “Good riddance.”

    Bhakta, a San Francisco native and tenant organizer for affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing, is well-versed in the seismic impact that the growth of the tech industry has had on the city. As software companies expanded over the past decade, they drew thousands of well-off newcomers who bid up rents and remade the city’s economy and culture.

    He said the sudden departure of many tech workers and executives — often to less expensive, rural areas where they can telecommute during the coronavirus pandemic — reveals that their relationship with San Francisco was “transactional” all along.

    “They used their capital to radically shift the makeup of poor, working-class communities,” Bhakta said. “We’re left with ‘for sale’ signs and price points that are still out of reach for most people.”

    Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry.

    Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such as Denver, Miami and Austin, Texas, citing housing costs, California’s relatively high income tax and the Bay Area’s general resistance to rapid growth and change.

  • Tesla CEO Elon Musk has moved to Texas. “‘It’s worth noting that Tesla is the last car company still manufacturing cars in California,’ Musk said. ‘There used to be over a dozen car plants in California, and California used to be the center of aerospace manufacturing. My companies are the last two left.'”
  • “Immediately After Moving To Texas, Elon Musk Announces Tesla AR-15.

    The new firearm will look similar to a standard AR-15 but will in fact be a battery-powered railgun capable of firing 3 million rounds per minute. It will also feature a fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth capability, heat-seeking ammunition, and a chainsaw bayonet, to name a few.

    At 3 million rounds a minute, trips to the shooting range would get very expensive…

  • Black Republican congressmen elect Burgess Owens of Utah and Byron Donalds of Florida look to oppose socialism. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • 21st century money laundering:

    Virtually unheard of a decade ago, these Chinese players are moving vast sums quickly and quietly, authorities said. Their expertise: routing cartel drug profits from the United States to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders. The launderers pay small Chinese-owned businesses in the United States and Mexico to help them move the funds. Most contact with the banking system happens in China, a veritable black hole for U.S. and Mexican authorities.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson tries yet again to get Texas to legalize casino gambling. “Adelson’s noteworthy lobbyist crew includes current and former high-ranking government officials, including former chiefs of staff to disgraced Speakers of the Texas House Joe Straus and Dennis Bonnen.” Of course.
    

  • OhNoNotThisShitAgain.jpg:

  • Iran’s Quds Force is sending weapons and troops to Venezuela.
  • Frederick Forsyth says that the reason the Brexit deal was scuttled at the last minute is that the EU was doing France’s bidding.

    After years covering France in Paris for the Reuters agency, and bilingual in French, I have a pretty good idea how the French system works. Basically, whoever appears to rule on the basis of elections, it is the graduates of the ENA who are really in charge. So what is it, this ultra-college?

    Founded under De Gaulle, it is a college designed to produce the true ruling class of the country, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or ENA and its graduates are the ENArques. More than all our public schools and Oxbridge put together, the ENA is accessible only by the brightest and the best to start with.

    After three years there the graduates are the elite of the elite. They move seamlessly from industry to commerce to banking to civil service to politics, and always in the top slots. They do not oppose each other. President Macron and Michel Barnier are both ENArques.

    As in all politics, election-winning is the key and in elections there are powerful voting blocs which must not be affronted. In France the biggest is the agricultural vote. Hence the EU’s incredibly expensive and burdensome Common Agricultural Policy, a money tree paid for by others, to subsidise France’s mediaeval and uncompetitive farming sector and its attendant sub-professions. Offend them and you lose the election.

    Not far behind comes the fishing industry. Emmanuel Macron is facing an election. That is why last week at the very threshold of an agreement with the UK, Michel Barnier got new orders from Paris. No, you have conceded too much to the Anglo Saxons – we want all the fish and free access to all the waters.

    It is easy to blame Barnier but he had his orders. That is why a German, Dane or Dutchman would have been better as the EU team leader. Germany, Denmark and Holland fish those waters but their politicians do not lose elections because of their fishing industries and they are not run by an ENA.

    In other news, Frederick Forsyth is still alive. (Hat tip: @davidjacksmith.)

  • Feds sue to break up Facebook.
  • Speaking of which: “Facebook’s Fact-Checker ‘Lead Stories’ is Staffed by Exclusively Democrat Party Donors, CNN Staffers, And ‘Defeat Trump’ Activists.”
  • Grant Baker at American Thinker has an interesting (and infuriating) three-part series on Democratic Party megadoner and accused serial killer Ed Buck, the man whose fetish seems to be overdosing gay black teenagers with drugs. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 talks about some of his rich and powerful political supporters:

    What could have bought Ed Buck so many layers of protection?

    West Hollywood politics has a glimmering rainbow surface, but the authentic underlying powers are real estate interests. The City Council controls the fate of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development projects, a fact reflected in their campaign contributions. “Developers don’t drop tens of thousands of dollars in West Hollywood because they like the City’s position on gay marriage, says former West Hollywood Mayor Steve Martin.

    With a huge war chest supporting them, a small handful of politicians reduced the government of West Hollywood to a game of musical chairs. John Duran, John D`Amico, John Heilman, Jeffrey Prang, and Abbe Land would bounce back and forth between the Mayor’s Office and City Council for decades, winning eighteen out of the last twenty-one mayoral elections between them.

    Ed Buck played a variety of supporting roles in the political machinery, buoying the chosen few.

    D’Amico’s political career was launched on the back of Buck’s support, winning a seat on City Council after marching through West Hollywood with Buck promoting his “Fur Free WeHo” campaign. Buck’s donations and connections to other major donors, including billionaire Gary Michelson, brought tens of thousands of dollars to Buck’s friends on City Council through multiple entities sharing the name ANIMAL PAC.

    Buck’s money also bought him a position on the Steering Committee of the Stonewall Democratic Club, the kingmaker of West Hollywood politics. Buck used his position on the Steering Committee to influence Stonewall’s secretive endorsement process, one “designed to protect incumbents and well-financed, well-connected candidates,” says a former Steering Committee member. Stonewall rank and file must have wondered why the LGBTQ group was promoting candidates for County Tax Assessor and Board of Equalization. Buck was so useful, Abbe Land would open City Council meetings by calling him to recite the pledge of allegiance.

    Officially retired since his early thirties, Buck would not have had the money to sustain his prolific spending habits relating to drugs, escorts, and politics. His biggest payday was in the 1980s when he flipped his friend’s business, Gopher Courier, to profit just over a million dollars, after which he lost money investing into pay-phones and a restaurant.

    After moving to West Hollywood, Buck was suspiciously cash-rich and asset poor, driving a wreck of a car and living in a rent-controlled apartment. Journalists paint Buck as a wealthy social climber, but his finances and lifestyle suggest he was a dirty political operative.

    Data from California’s political contribution records is highly truncated, but campaign finance rules create patterns that highlight alliances.

    One can skirt contribution limits and obscure contribution origins by breaking up large donations into smaller payments and passing them through family members and political allies, so I looked for donors that matched Buck’s donations.

    He donated varying amounts to plenty of politicians and causes, but there were consistent primary beneficiaries such as Jeffrey Prang, John Duran, Scott Svonkin, Honesty PAC, and of course, his ANIMAL PACs. The highly incestuous top donors who also supported Prang, Duran, Svonkin, and Buck’s PACs were real estate interests, chief among them being Excel Property Management Services managed by CEO Arman Gabay. Arman Gabay and his company funded Jeffrey Prang’s successful 2014 Los Angeles County Assessor bid with the help of Ed Buck, Ed Buck’s future attorney Seymour Amster, ANIMAL PAC, John Duran, West Hollywood activists, and various real estate interests. The same donors also funded periphery candidates who endorsed Prang and Svonkin.

    As County Assessor, Jeffrey Prang controls property taxes on $1.7 trillion worth of property, explaining why his donors are real estate interests. The Tax Assessor is a notoriously corrupt office, both in Los Angeles and across the country. Jeffrey Prang’s predecessor was arrested by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office on bribery charges after selling tax breaks. Eighteen Tax Assessors in New York City were arrested on bribery charges after real estate developer Donald Trump realized he was paying more in taxes than his competitors.

    This is where Scott Svonkin’s role comes in. Funded by Ed Buck, Buck’s attorney Seymour Amster, and a small handful of real estate interests after Gemmel Moore’s death in Buck’s apartment, Honesty PAC was created solely to fund Scott Svonkin’s 2018 for Board of Equalization, an oversight position overseeing the County Tax Assessor Jeffrey Prang. The kicker: Scott Svonkin was an aide to Jeffrey Prang while he served on West Hollywood City Council.

    Scott Svonkin’s 2018 bid was unsuccessful, but the setback did not deter Jeffrey Prang. Whistleblowers filed suit against Prang for giving favorable tax treatment to West Hollywood real estate interests by intentionally losing legal cases, reversing property tax decisions, and reimbursing millions of dollars in back taxes for favored companies and individuals. Worse, Arman Gabay was arrested in May 2018 for allegedly soliciting preferable tax treatment from County Officials, soliciting public funds for his development projects, trading political donations in exchange for help on West Hollywood development projects, and other crimes involving political patronage. From a January 2020 prosecutor’s motion: “in another phone call agents intercepted on or about April 22, 2017, defendant made clear why he donates to public officials — he expects things in return.” When asked to contribute to reelect “Public Official 5,” he refused “because the last time he donated, defendant did not get anything from Public Official 5. Referring to Public Official 5, defendant said “f[*]ck him.”

    If Arman Gabay had helpful public officials on his payroll, he and others likely had Ed Buck on it, too, which would explain Buck’s mysterious revenue stream. Buck’s choice of Christopher Darden as his defense attorney shows he still has plenty of cash to play with and that investigators aren’t chasing down where it comes from. Prosecutors seem to know Buck’s income is off the books; they requested an order from the court to ensure “no portion of the proffered bail was feloniously obtained.” Even from jail, Buck still has cards to play, especially if his corruption touches politicians or some in the district attorney’s office.

  • Israel and Morocco strike normalize relations. Nothing to see here, just that idiot Trump helping facilitate another peace deal between Israel and the Muslim world…
  • “Goya CEO names AOC as employee of the month after her boycott call sends sales soaring.”
  • Oopsie!
  • J.C. Penny’s is back from corporate bankruptcy. Sort of. Kind of.
  • Snapshots of the continuing decline of Austin:

  • Austin decommissions shitty art. Of the “artworks,” two are garbage, one is already gone, one is so badly decayed it has to be torn down, and one is literally a circle of rocks. It’s fine as rock circles go, but a yard guy could probably put one together for you for less than 20 bucks.
  • Chuck Yeager, RIP.
  • Rehab for Vice bloggers:

  • Bob Dylan sells out.
  • All your Spidermen are belong to us.
  • “Hallmark Channel Announces 19 New Coronavirus-Themed Movies.”
  • BidenWatch for September 28, 2020

    Monday, September 28th, 2020

    Democrats panic (some more), Slow Joe slowjoes some more, Rand Paul asks DOJ to look into Hunter’s sleaze, and inside Biden’s vast haberdashery collection. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • The first Biden-Trump debate is scheduled for Tuesday. We’ll see if it actually happens.
  • “Biden Campaign Warns That For Debate Biden Will Need A Mask That Completely Conceals His Face And He Might Sound Different.”
  • Reasons for Biden supporters to worry:

    First, there are indications that Trump’s base of support — whites without college degrees — is more energized and committed to voting this year than key Democratic constituencies. And there is also evidence that polling does not reflect this.

    Second, Latinos, who are key to the outcome in several crucial states — Arizona and Florida, for example — have shown less support for Biden than for past Democratic nominees. Many Hispanic voters seem resistant to any campaign that defines them broadly as “people of color.”

    Third, absentee voting is expected to be higher among Democrats than Republicans, subjecting their ballots to a greater risk of rejection, a fate more common to mailed-in votes than to in-person voting.

    Fourth, the generic Democratic-Republican vote (“Would you be more willing to vote for a Republican or Democratic candidate for Congress?”) through early July favored Democrats by more than 10 points, but has since narrowed to 6 points.

    Fifth, the debates will test Biden’s ability to withstand three 90-minute battles against an opponent known for brutal personal attacks.

    Details further down:

    A Democratic strategist — who requested anonymity because his employer does not want him publicly identified talking about the election — analyzed the implications of the most recent voter registration trends for me.

    In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, he said, overall

    registration is up by 6 points through August compared to the 2016 cycle, but net Democratic registrations are down by 38 percent. That’s about 150,000 fewer additional Democrats than were added in 2016.

    In addition, he continued, registration among whites without college degrees

    is up by 46 percent while registration by people of color is up by only 4 percent. That gap is made more stark when you realize that over the last four years, the WNC (white non-college) population has increased by only 1 percent in those states, while the number of people of color increased by 13 percent.

    The pattern was more pronounced in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than it was in Michigan.

    On its own, increased registration among non-college whites would have only a negligible effect on total state voting, my source pointed out, but

    it becomes troubling if it reflects greater interest more generally for these voters in those states. And there are good reasons to believe that if that is the case, those additionally energized voters are very underrepresented in surveys now.

    On weakness of Biden support Hispanic voters:

    While Democrats have struggled for years with non-college whites, another set of problems for Biden and the party has begun to emerge this year in what many liberals had been counting on as a key constituency: the steadily growing Hispanic electorate.

    As Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Tory Gavito, a human rights lawyer who is president of Way to Win and the founder of the Texas Future Project, wrote on these pages on Sept. 18:

    According to recent polls from Quinnipiac and Monmouth, 38 percent of registered Hispanic voters in 10 battleground states may be ambivalent about even voting. At least so far, this large group of Latinos seemingly perceives little reason to choose Mr. Biden over President Trump.

    Why? López and Gavito offer an explanation based on 15 focus groups and a national survey:

    Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

    In fact, the authors continued, the majority of Hispanics

    rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

    Another data point they found “even more sobering”: López and Gavito asked

    eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned “illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs” and called for “fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.”

    As they expected, “almost three out of five white respondents judged that message convincing.”

    More disconcerting to López and Gavito, both liberals, was that “exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.”

    Poll after poll has shown that Hispanic Americans don’t want MS-13 and other criminal aliens in their community, but Democrats have pointedly ignored that in favor of pushing their “OMG, separated families!” and “racist dog whistle” talking points and pandering to hard left open borders activists.

    You have to get much further down before any mention of the Antia/#BlackLivesMatter riots. Completely missing from this piece: The words “Hunter Biden,” “Burisma” and “China”…

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Biden, ‘The Great and Powerful’:

    Media bias is not new.

    In addition to the Russian collusion hoax and the phone-call impeachment farce, who can forget the marquee media toadies of JournoList and the release of John Podesta’s email trove?

    Or the moderator Donna Brazile’s primary debate questions, leaked through CNN, or Candy Crowley’s hijacking of a debate as moderator-turned-real-time-hack “fact-checker”?

    Nothing then is new to the media’s fusion and collusion with the “progressive party.”

    Yet never in American history have mainstream journalists not merely promoted a candidate but actively fused with his political candidacy to the point of warping, fabricating, and Trotskyizing the news and indeed history itself.

    The trope of a vast charade to create an illusionary powerful figure out of nothing is an old one in fiction, Hollywood and television. We remember “The Great and Powerful” Wizard of Oz fakery, a formidable screen image created backstage by gears and levers operated by a tiny man “behind the curtain.” Similar is the famous scene in an episode of the old Star Trek series, depicting a near comatose on-air John Gill used as a televised prop by his puppeteers, in a utopian federation project gone haywire.

    But reality has outdone art with the Biden campaign. The concoction is holistic, from the mundane construction of a fantasy, on-the-go candidate to the supposed middle-of-the road old Joe Biden from Scranton radiating an aura of kindness and moderation in times of plague, panic, and protest.

    For six months, Biden has run a Zoom campaign on the pretext of mandatory quarantines—our current version of a 19th-century, stationary presidential candidate, who campaigned by spitting out wit and wisdom while immovable on his front porch.

    Biden has conducted no free-wheeling, unscripted press conferences. He will not do extended one-on-one interviews with a disinterested journalist. He rarely will even try Trump-like cameo appearances on CNN or MSNBC to answer unscripted questions from supporters. His press events instead are Orwellian, requiring a media mass suspension of disbelief.

    The questions are canned. They are submitted in advance by “journalists,” whether formally or via electronic chatter. The inquiries are obsequious—seldom a word about Hunter Biden, China, Biden’s troubling racist remarks, his handsy past, his scary cognitive lapses, or his “contract” with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Instead the softball, known-in-advance inquiries are in spirit carried over from the Obama years, phrased in the manner of “Were you outraged enough by Trump’s outrage?”

    Biden’s Oz functionaries seemingly are always experimenting with all sorts of screen props. The trick is to discover how best their challenged candidate can square the circle of completing sentences and remaining semi-coherent, while not giving away the game that his illusionists are feeding him answers to synthetic questions.

    When asked point-blank on Fox News by Brett Baier whether Biden used a stealth teleprompter, his national press flak, T.J. Ducklo would not answer with a simple yes or no. Instead, he went on the attack, with the fossilized accusation that right-wing Fox News asks too many partisan questions.

    So we were left with a de facto “yes”: Biden does read off a stealthy teleprompter when answering canned press questions—and gives the impression he does not.

    But Biden, like the mirage of the Wizard of Oz, nonetheless can’t always keep the curtain closed.

    When he strains to see the teleprompter that sits just behind, and thus out of sight of, his camera lens, he slips and mutters “bring it closer”—reminding any who watch, except the media that helps collude in these orchestrations, that the question asked is not a serious one, but a prompt to facilitate the proper nonspontaneous response.

    Snip.

    Sometimes the effort is scary. When old photos reappear in a CNN puff piece about a younger Biden holding his young son at a long-ago Washington Redskins game, the team logo—the now-politically incorrect Redskins logo—is airbrushed from his son’s stocking cap. And then presto, legions of “disinterested” “fact-checkers” in the media emerge to confess that Biden, not CNN, supplied the doctored image.

    But, in turn, the Biden campaign assures the press that the doctoring was only for “copyright” reasons, as if candidates routinely photoshop out all the cap logos they wear. The impression is that Biden is terrified that his new leftist friends in the Ministry of Truth are combing his past and ordering embarrassing moments to go down the memory hole.

    As a general rule, the Soviet-style apologia for the media-Biden fusion—usually outsourced to a now utterly corrupt left-wing institution called “fact-checking”—only solidifies the fact that the media and the Biden campaign are indistinguishable.

    In Soviet times, one easily just assumed the opposite from Moscow’s party-line efforts and, presto, stumbled onto the truth. In the case of Biden’s optics and press conferences and appearances, we easily deduce that the downside of scripting and programming a compliant candidate far outweighs the existential risk of turning Biden loose to answer questions like a normal human being.

    True, even before his cognitive decline, Biden was known in Washington as someone whose incoherent and impromptu loquaciousness usually embarrassed his friends more than hurt his enemies—in addition to his long history of plagiarism and inflating his thin résumés with false data about his past.

    But with the onset of his cognitive decline, Biden’s own once-feeble social antennae are now more or less unplugged most of the day.

    The result is that he has a creepy propensity to blurt out patently racist tropes as if the old inner Biden who talked of Obama as “clean” and the first “articulate” black presidential candidate, and pandered to his working-class Democratic supporters with references to the inner-city “jungle,” is now free of his harnesses, bits, and halters.

    For some time, Biden unchained has shouted about “you ain’t black,” and, earlier, his Corn Pop series of inflated tales as Biden, the white knight, equipped with a chain no less, protecting the inner city from itself.

    Biden showed his tough-guy mettle with putdowns of a transitorily noncompliant black journalist and sneered that he is comparable to a “junkie” and drug addict. To a liberated Biden, blacks just don’t think independently like Latinos.

  • As First Presidential Debate Nears, Democrats Are Concerned About Biden. Ya think?

    The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is happening on Tuesday night. Democrats are playing it cool, but there is real concern about how Biden will perform.

    In a format like this, Biden is on his own. There is no campaign handler who can suddenly step in and shut down the event by saying “OK, thanks so much everyone.”

    Sean Sullivan and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post wrote this rather revealing story:

    Trump readies a debate onslaught — and Biden allies worry

    President Trump is gearing up to launch blistering personal attacks on Joe Biden and his family in the first presidential debate on Tuesday, while Biden is bracing for an onslaught and worried allies are warning the Democratic nominee not to lose his temper and lash out, according to people with knowledge of the strategies in both camps.

    Trump has told associates he wants to talk specifically about his opponent’s son Hunter Biden and mused that the debates are when “people will finally realize Biden is just not there,” according to one adviser. The president is so eager to lay into his rival that he has called aides to test out various attacks, focusing on attacks that cast Biden as a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment, said another adviser, who like many interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private talks.

    Biden and his advisers are anticipating a venomous barrage, according to a person with knowledge of their thinking, and they are preparing to counter with an affirmative case for a Biden presidency. The Democrat wants to stay focused on how he would address the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s economic problems, which he blames Trump for worsening.

    The prospect of a cage match between a president for whom no subject is off-limits and a challenger who can be openly emotional is making some Biden advisers nervous. They see a fine line between Biden’s passion and empathy, which can appeal to voters, and the raw anger that sometimes gets him in trouble and could undercut his pitch as a calming alternative to a president who thrives on chaos.

    Two quick reactions. First of all, Joe Biden is “a longtime Washington insider with a limited record of accomplishment.” Second, why shouldn’t Trump go after Biden’s family? Hasn’t Trump’s family been fair game for Democrats and the media over the last four years?

    In another sign of the left’s utter panic, Nancy Pelosi is doubling down on her suggestion that Biden shouldn’t even bother debating Trump. Funny, she didn’t feel that way about Obama in 2008 or 2012. What changed?

    I think we all know the answer to that: The number of synapses still firing in Biden’s head.

  • The Biden campaign has “called a lid” (i.e., said Biden is not campaigning any more that day and reporters can go home) before noon nine times in September. Biden must have more lids than Charles Nelson Reilly.

    Biden is accomplishing the rare feat of making Hillary look like a workaholic in comparison…

  • Where’s Waljoe?

    Presumably, Biden is so exhausted from his rigorous morning routine of plug and denture maintenance that he only has energy enough to campaign fewer than two out of every three days.

    To his credit, Biden did manage to campaign for six days in a row during the first week of September. But since then, he’s ditched his own presidential campaign eight out of the last 18 days.

    That’s not a good look for a man who is supposed to have energy enough to hold the most demanding office in the world.

    I had a conversation with Bill Whittle on this same topic earlier this week, and Bill reminded me of his newly minted Whittle’s Law: When they let the optics look this bad, it’s because the alternative optics would look even worse.

    In other words, the former veep or his handlers have made the conscious decision that it’s safer for Tired Joe Biden to stay tucked away every other day or so than to have him campaign in the traditional, vigorous manner.

    What could possibly look worse than a presidential candidate who isn’t up to the job of campaigning?

    Well, this:

    He sounds out of breath from just walking to the podium.

  • More on the same subject:

  • More Democrats worry about Biden’s “laid back” approach:

    The final stretch of a presidential campaign is typically a nonstop mix of travel, caffeine and adrenaline. But as the worst pandemic in a century bears down on the United States, Joe Biden is taking a lower key approach.

    Since his Aug. 11 selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, Biden has had 22 days where he either didn’t make public appearances, held only virtual fundraisers or ventured from his Delaware home solely for church, according to an Associated Press analysis of his schedules. He made 12 visits outside of Delaware during that period, including Friday when he went to Washington and paid respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

    During the same time, President Donald Trump had 24 trips that took him to 17 different states, not counting a personal visit to New York to see his ailing brother in the hospital or weekend golf outings. He was hitting Florida, Georgia, Virginia and the nation’s capital on Friday alone.

    Biden’s aides insist his approach is intentional, showcasing his respect for public health guidelines aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus and presenting a responsible contrast with Trump, who has resumed large-scale campaign rallies — sometimes over the objections of local officials. Still, some Democrats say it’s critical that Biden infuse his campaign with more energy.

    Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said not traveling because of the pandemic was a “pretty lame excuse.”

    “I thought he had his own plane,” Hinojosa said. “He doesn’t have to sit with one space between another person on a commercial airline like I would.”

    When the Texas Democratic Party says you’re “lame,” maybe you have a problem…

  • Remember, if it were up to Joe Biden, Osama bin Laden would still be alive.
  • My breakdown of the Senate’s Hunter Biden report, in case you missed it.
  • When asked last year about Hunter’s crooked dealings, Biden’s response was injudicious:

  • Sen. Rand Paul is sending the DOJ Hunter Biden report to the Department of Justice for criminal referral. As well he should.
  • Biden compares President Trump to Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. At this point, does any Democrat calling any Republican a Nazi count as news? (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Florida Republican see surge in registration. Hat tip…
  • Borepatch, who opines on why the polls are wrong.
  • Stephen Green wargames electoral college scenarios.
  • Liberals who think that Kamala Harris is going to walk over Mike Pence in a debate are warned to lower their expectations. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Slow Joe Reloaded:

  • “I lost the line.”

  • Speaking of Slow Joe’s ever more tenuous grip on reality, “Biden said he was a student at Delaware State University; school says otherwise.”
  • Biden makes a mountain out of an Irish molehill. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Heh, numerology division:

  • Agreed:

  • MSNBC talking head Dr. Vin Gupta fails to reveal he works as an advisor to the Biden campaign.
  • Evidently Joe’s been in the Senate for 180 years:

    Maybe his staff is afraid he’ll go on a rant about what swell guys John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis were…

  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for May 15, 2020

    Friday, May 15th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s theme is Democratic Governor’s ignoring the constitution to keep their precious lockdowns going, Obamagate, spying (domestic and foreign), a bit about aircraft, and funny animals. Dig in!

  • The economy: is the worst over? Let’s hope.
  • Remember how Georgia lifting the lockdown and opening the economy was going to kill everyone’s granny? Yeah, not so much: “Georgia Records Lowest Number of Coronavirus Patients in over a Month.”
  • More medical hope:

    Ever since President Trump expressed optimism about the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, the mere mention of that drug can elicit instantaneous, strident, and finger-wagging condemnation by the mainstream media and all those who are pulling for the pandemic to lay waste to the economy and pave the way for a fundamental progressive transformation of America. Despite its use by health-care providers across the country and around the world to successfully treat COVID-19, you will be mocked as either a fool or a snake oil salesman if you approvingly utter the word “hydroxychloroquine” or even express hope that it can be used to save lives. The word is simply not to be tolerated in polite, progressive society.

    Well, it appears that the list of forbidden words is about to get longer. The new additions include “corticosteroids” and “Methylprednisolone.”

    What do these widely available and relatively inexpensive drugs with known safety profiles have in common with hydroxychloroquine? Leading physicians are using them in addition to hydroxychloroquine to successfully treat COVID-19. And they are doing so without waiting two or three years for the results of randomized clinical trials.

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States.” “New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.”
  • Speaking of Michigan:

    It is difficult to describe, and impossible to exaggerate, just how badly Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s COVID-19 response has been, and it has been a catastrophe from the very beginning. In early March, when the country was already becoming concerned about the spread of the virus, Whitmer did not cancel the Democratic presidential primary, and indeed, there was record turnout for the March 10 primary, which turned into a “super spreader” event in metropolitan Detroit. She has since bungled practically every aspect of the pandemic, including her deliberately punitive and irrational lockdown policy. Now she would have us believe that she is the real victim of all this:

    Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said Wednesday that the lockdown protests are “racist and misogynistic” and called on those with a platform to discourage the demonstrators.

    Whitmer told ABC’s “The View” that the protests are “really political” as demonstrators have brought nooses, Confederate flags and Nazi symbolism.

    “This is not appropriate in a global pandemic,” she said. “But it’s certainly not an exercise of democratic principles where we have free speech. This is calls to violence. This is racist and misogynistic.”

    I have no idea who brought nooses, etc., to these protests, although I suspect these were false-flag agents provocateurs — leftists pretending to be part of the protest and acting in ways intended to discredit Whitmer’s opponents. None of this, however, justifies her policies.

  • Just in case you thought there was an end to her awful policies: “Michigan state Rep. Leslie Love (D-Detroit) is blasting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) policy of returning coronavirus patients to nursing homes, making the Detroit lawmaker the second Democrat to criticize the governor publicly in less than a month.”
  • Speaking of which: “NY officials allowed COVID-positive workers to stay on the job at nursing homes — the facilities account for 25% of deaths in the state.” More of that brilliant one-party Democratic rule…
  • “Media Lies: Democrat Governors Doing Great Jobs Despite Higher Wuhan Death Rates.”
  • Continuing the theme (click to expand image):

  • Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy: “Screw your rights. Stay at home.” Wisconsin Supreme Court: “Unconstitutional.” Wisconsin Governor and bureaucracy the very same day: “Oh yeah? Then screw your religion! No meetings for you God weirdos!” Every. Knee. Must. Bend.
  • That crap doesn’t fly in Texas:

    Dallas County Commissioner Judge Clay Jenkins has repeatedly tried to act as the ruler of Dallas County by attempting to force his will on everyone within it and each time he’s been put back in his place by everyone from the citizens of Dallas County to his own fellow commissioners.

    Jenkins has now awakened the wrath of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who issued a warning to him and other officials in other Texas counties who are trying to illegally prevent Texans from living doing things such as attending church.

    According to Paxton’s office, a warning was issued to three county judges and two mayors telling them to back off their make-believe thrones, or else there will be consequences:

    Attorney General Ken Paxton today issued letters to three Texas counties (Dallas, Bexar, and Travis) and two mayors (San Antonio and Austin), warning that some requirements in their local public health orders are unlawful and can confuse law-abiding citizens. These unlawful and unenforceable requirements include strict and unconstitutional demands for houses of worship, unnecessary and onerous restrictions on allowing essential services to operate, such as tracking customers who visit certain restaurants, penalties for not wearing masks, shelter-in-place demands, criminal penalties for violating state or local health orders, and failing to differentiate between recommendations and mandates.

  • The curve Democrats really want to flatten:

  • The government-imposed lockdown needs to end. But lot’s of people have (properly) set their own lockdown standards:

    Many of the most important mitigation strategies are unknown to the general public because they’ve taken place behind closed doors on the initiative of employers, not bureaucrats, and have little or nothing to do with legal mandates (which are themselves, as I can attest is the case here in Canada, a contradictory, hastily-conceived patchwork of federal and provincial directives and advisories). To give but one example I happen to be familiar with: Many of the men and women you see driving delivery trucks and construction vehicles are now governed by all sorts of rules, at pickup and drop-off, that allow them to perform their functions without coming within six feet of others. In some cases, they’ve been enabled with apps on their phones or dash-mounted tablets that permit them to coordinate these functions without any direct on-site human interaction whatsoever. Or they might be subject to thermometer-gun screenings to determine if they have a fever. Having implemented these lockdown-lite policies at great cost and inconvenience, employers aren’t going to dump them the moment the government gives them permission to do so, even though these procedures have increased costs and decreased output.

    Many employers I speak to are actually far more constricted by the concerns of their own employees than by the law itself. At one workplace that I know of, the boss announced that loosened provincial restrictions mean that everyone can come back to work this month. To his surprise, his employees announced that they’d voted on the issue through Facebook, and, no, they would not be coming back, at least not yet. And in Quebec, which is starting to let elementary-school students come back to class this month, thousands of parents—a majority at some schools—have decided to keep their children home. I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.

    To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along.

  • Devin Nunes thinks that the entire Trump transition team was under surveillance by the Obama Administration. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Don Surber asked a question back in 2017 that we ought to take a fresh look at: Was Obama using the NSA to spy on Romney during the 2012 election? Given what we know of Crossfire Hurricane, would anyone put it past him?
  • Related:

  • Russia, Russia, Russia!

  • Oh, lovely. Crowdstrike admits that there was no evidence that Russia hacked the DNC server.
  • Lives better for the living:

  • Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador would like to know the truth behind Obama’s Fast and Furious illegal gun running program. A lot of us would like to know the same thing…
  • EU and German courts (strangely two different things in this story) are having a pissing match over whose gavel is bigger.
  • Canadian Broadcasting Company can’t decide just how it wants to lie about The Epoch Times and its reporting on the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability in the Wuhan Coronavirus. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • TSMC to build chip foundry in Arizona. This is a pretty big deal, as TSMC currently has the best fab tech in the world, and this will be their first ground-up American foundry (they currently have (I think) two other American fabs as the result of acquisitions from WaferTech and TI).
  • Arkansas Professor Arrested For Concealing Communist Chinese Funding.”

    An engineering professor at the University of Arkansas has been arrested by the FBI and faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly hiding funding that he received from the communist Chinese government.

    The New York Times reports that “Simon Ang of the University of Arkansas, was arrested on Friday and charged on Monday with wire fraud.”

    “He worked for and received funding from Chinese companies and from the Thousand Talents program, which awards grants to scientists to encourage relationships with the Chinese government,” the report notes, adding that “he warned an associate to keep his affiliation with the program quiet.”

    The report explains that Ang’s alleged hiding of the funding enabled him to also get US government subsidies, specifically from NASA, to the tune of more than $5 million.

  • “Chinese Government Lays Off Entire Propaganda Team As American Media Doing Their Job For Them.
  • CNN Replaces President Trump’s Press Briefings With President Xi’s.”
  • Capitalist fungus. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Billy doesn’t respond well to pressure.”
  • “Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY.”
  • Important safety tip: Don’t stand on an active airport runway. This was Austin, so odds are it was an adler.
  • For Rich:

  • The Los Angeles Rams uniforms are horrible garbage.
  • “Democratic States Deploy Greta Thunberg Drones To Lecture People Who Go Outside.”
  • Water sausage eats breakfast:

  • Goat rodeo:

  • This dog is on my wavelength:

  • LinkSwarm for April 3, 2020

    Friday, April 3rd, 2020

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I hope all of you are avoiding going stir-crazy. I bet you can guess the top topics this week:

  • U.S. Intelligence confirms what anyone not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome figured out long ago: China’s communist government has been lying about the Wuhan Coronavirus all along:

    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’s viral coronavirus propaganda campaign:

    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 vs. 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.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of China, I’ve been thinking of doing a separate post on this piece on just how filthy and unsanitary China is, but the topic is just too gross for me to deal with it at length.
  • 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 Wuhan Coronavirus has eight different strains.
  • Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has now treated 699 coronavirus patients with 100% success using Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate, Zinc and Z-Pak.
  • Coronavirus dispatches from a New Orleans ER doctor. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Looking at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s coronavirus projections, both past and present.

    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…
  • “If you claim that calling it ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ is racist, you are part of the cover-up.”
  • 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.)

  • Speaking of Italy, they’re burning the EU flag and threatening to leave over the EU’s lousy coronavirus response.
  • 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?
  • The danger of Huawei’s 5G rollout:

    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.
  • Justice Department finally weighs in that boys and girls are biologically different. About damn time…
  • 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.)
  • Don’t use Zoom. All sorts of security and privacy concerns. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Have you tried powering down and then restarting your Boeing 787? Try that and see if it fixes the problem…”
  • “China: ‘We’ve Completely Cured Coronavirus And Everything Is Fine Here And No One Is Allowed In To Check.”
  • Well, that wasn’t very smart. (Hat tip: johnnyk2001.)
  • Analysis: True:

  • Dwight offers handy tips on vehicle ambush counterattacks, for when the roving cannibal antifa hijack mobs try to attack you later this year.
  • “Chick-Fil-A Temporarily Changes Slogan To ‘Eat Fewer Bats.'”
  • “New York To Raise Taxes On Coronavirus Causing It To Flee State.”
  • Heh:

  • Heh with music:

    (Hat tip: Carpe Donktum.)

  • Good boy!

  • So! Many! Good! Boys!