Posts on Tuesday, May 26, 2020
President Trump accused Twitter of election interference after the social media giant fact-checked two of his tweets in an unprecedented move.“@Twitter is now interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump tweeted Tuesday, shortly after the company flagged two of his morning tweets as misleading.“They are saying my statement on Mail-In Ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post. Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!”
East Harlem, Manhattan—A 64-year old Harlem woman who's been in a medically-induced coma since she was attacked and sexually assaulted is expected to die, prosecutors said. Frankie Harris, 38, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of rape, strangulation and attempted murder, but the Manhattan District Attorney's Office expects murder charges will need to be filed against the Brooklyn man. On the night of May 18, Harris allegedly put the victim in a chokehold for several minutes before repeatedly sexually assaulting the woman, officials aid. She was left unconscious on the pavement. Harris initially told authorities the sex was consensual,
Trump’s NatSec Advisor Robert O’Brien
Drains the Swamp, Cuts Staff to
HALF of Obama-Era Levels replies
Drains the Swamp, Cuts Staff to
HALF of Obama-Era Levels replies
National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien slashed the National Security Council staff to half of Obama-era levels.The NatSec purge started in February when President Trump fired the Vindman twins from their National Security Council positions in the Trump White House. The President also cut 70 Obama-era holdovers from the NatSec in February. Trump’s goal is to cut the agency in half.On Tuesday, the New York Post reported that Trump’s NatSec Advisor Robert O’Brien dramatically cut down the size of the NatSec Council. President Trump’s national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien has dramatically slashed the size of the National Security Council —
Ireland’s prime minister has been accused of breaking his own social distancing rules after being snapped topless while picnicking with pals in a packed park. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar stripped off with partner Matthew Barrett and two friends in Dublin on Sunday—just days after one of his senior officials warned against picnics or staying outside longer than necessary. The photos sparked outrage, with the Irish Independent accusing him of being like other politicians “simply making things up as they go along” while others called for his resignation on Twitter.(Snip)
My mother hasn’t hugged my son in 9 weeks but he can play with his
Multiple news outlets are reporting that House Republicans plan to file a lawsuit in federal court against Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) over a recent pandemic-related rule change that allows a single member of Congress to serve as a proxy vote for up to 10 other members of Congress. According to The Wall Street Journal, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will lead the lawsuit and be joined by nearly two dozen other legislators, including GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA). The New York Times reports the lawsuit will argue that the rule change,
The pandemic has heightened the need for interpreters as hospitals cope with a disproportionate number of COVID-19 patients who speak languages other than English. As of mid-May, 22% of the Minnesota Department of Health’s interviews with people who had laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases required an interpreter—more than five times the proportion of the state’s population lacking fluency in English. At least part of the trend is driven by outbreaks at meatpacking plants that employ many immigrant workers, such as the JBS pork processing plant in Worthington, where hundreds of employees contracted the virus.(Snip) In-house interpreters work in 16 languages,
The Remains of Administration
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Each day that the Obama administration fades into the past, its wrongdoings manage to wander back into the present.
After years of suppression, all sorts of strange events keep popping up to remind us of what little is left of the Obama years — the Susan Rice memo, Christopher Steele deleting his computer records, FBI-doctored and lost 302s, text messages wiped clean, the bizarre Obama January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting, the ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the unmasking and leaking of redacted names swept up in reverse-targeting surveillance operations, the administration fraud perpetrated on the FISA courts. The list
Four Minnesota officers have been fired following the detainment of a man who died Monday night after being pinned to the ground by an officer who put his knee on the man's neck for about eight minutes.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said it was the "right call" to terminate the officers in a tweet announcing the decision Tuesday. The police department said the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the FBI would be independently investigating the incident. (snip)
"Please, please, please, I can't breathe," the man begs. "My stomach hurts. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can't
The black man accosted by a white dog-walker in Central Park has posted an online rundown of what happened right before videotaping the now-infamous confrontation. Christian Cooper—a Harvard University grad, former Marvel Comics editor and a current member of the board directors for the New York City chapter of the Audubon Society, according to reports and the nature organization—wrote on Facebook on Monday: “Central Park this morning: This woman’s dog is tearing through the plantings in the Ramble. “ME: Ma’am, dogs in the Ramble have to be on the leash at all times. The sign is right there.
The coronavirus outbreak has taken the lives of nearly 100,000 Americans. Yet since the start of the outbreak, the death toll has been concentrated in a just a few places – mostly large metropolitan areas, especially the New York City area. The places hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak – which have relatively large shares of ethnic and racial minorities and residents living in densely populated urban and suburban areas – are almost all represented by congressional Democrats. A new Pew Research Center analysis of data on official reports of COVID-19 deaths, collected by the John Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and
Twitter added labels to President Trump’s tweets for the first time on Tuesday.
The social media company added a link to two of Mr. Trump’s tweets in which he had posted about mail-in ballots. The link urged users to “get the facts” about voting by mail.
Mr. Trump has tweeted several times about mail-in ballots in recent days, accusing California, Michigan and other states of enabling voter fraud by distributing mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic. Voting by mail would be “substantially fraudulent,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
Trump wins the lockdown wars
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President Trump has won the lockdown wars as coronavirus-related restrictions on businesses are eased across the country, so far with few signs of dire health consequences for the population.
Just weeks ago, the question was whether to reopen, with the first states to press ahead accused of engaging in human sacrifice and killing their residents to appease the “Trump death cult.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman asked, “How many will die for the Dow?” as recently as Thursday.
Now, the debate is primarily over how quickly and to what extent reopening should take place,
Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric
Grenell Leaves Behind a Long List of
Accomplishments replies
Grenell Leaves Behind a Long List of
Accomplishments replies
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell steps down on Tuesday, leaving behind a long list of accomplishments in his short and historic tenure.In a period of just three months, he streamlined and reformed the intelligence community (IC), saving $19 million.He also declassified a trove of intelligence documents that House Democrats had refused to release, which cast doubt on their Russian collusion narrative. In addition, he declassified a list of Obama administration officials who requested the unmasking of Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Flynn. And he declassified transcripts of Flynn’s call with a Russian ambassador for the future potential release by incoming Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
Conservatives have long been blowing the whistle on Wikipedia’s leftist bias. The site’s co-founder Larry Sanger apparently agrees with them.In a blog post last week, Sanger argued that Wikipedia has abandoned all neutrality in the name of avoiding what activist journalists call the “false balance” – the idea that not all opposing views of an argument should be given equal time. He goes through several pages to support his thesis, noting the rather charged language often employed.When comparing the pages for former President Barack Obama and the current President Donald Trump, the differences are night and day, with the former receiving overwhelmingly positive treatment while the latter
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.” That’s what former president Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, told a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties in a Zoom party last week, according to Politico. The former cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs in the Zoom boxes were confused, though some of the Republicans may have been newly relieved and some of the Democrats suddenly concerned.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany shot down criticism from Fox News host Chris Wallace for claiming that she was out of line in her responses to reporters during a Friday press conference.During his “Fox News Sunday” program, Wallace devoted a segment to blast McEnany’s performance, saying her remarks about reporters seemingly not being interested in the reopening of churches around the country shuttered during the coronavirus pandemic were inappropriate.“I spent six years in the White House Briefing Room covering Ronald Reagan. I have to say, I never, and, in the years since too, I never saw a White House press secretary act like that,” Wallace said.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer confirmed her husband made “a failed attempt at humor” over the weekend after a comment he made to a docking company drew criticism from conservatives. In a now-deleted Facebook post, Tad Dowker, owner of NorthShore Dock LLC, said a man called the company a few days before Memorial Day weekend asking if he could put his boat in the water. According to Dowker’s post, when office staff said the company started working three weeks late so that was not going to happen, staff told him the caller said, “I am the husband to the governor, will this make a difference?”
As one of his last actions before leaving his post, former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard “Ric” Grenell has declassified the transcripts of the wiretapped phone conversations between former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Additionally, it appears that Grenell has declassified some of the origination documents from the CIA and U.S. intel community that were manipulated in the assembly of the Intelligence Community Assessment (an aspect of particular importance to USAO John John Durham). As we suspected Ric Grenell is leaving the decision, and timing for their release to incoming DNI John Ratcliffe.
As Governor Andrew Cuomo faced a spirited challenge in his bid to win New York’s 2018 Democratic primary, his political apparatus got a last-minute boost: a powerful healthcare industry group suddenly poured more than $1m into a Democratic committee backing his campaign. Less than two years after that flood of cash from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), Cuomo signed legislation last month quietly shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits stemming from the coronavirus outbreak. The provision, inserted into an annual budget bill by Cuomo’s aides, created one of the nation’s most explicit immunity protections for healthcare
Medicare recipients will be able to get prescription plans that limit copays for insulin, a potential savings of hundreds of dollars, the White House announced Tuesday in a pivot to pocketbook issues that could influence November's election.
The new benefit — to be formally unveiled at a Rose Garden event Tuesday afternoon — is being touted as a major accomplishment by Trump administration officials eager to change the subject from the grim drumbeat of coronavirus pandemic news. Older adults who pick a drug plan offering the new insulin benefit would pay a maximum of $35 a month starting next year, a savings estimated at $446 annually.
Joe Biden made his big comeback Monday, emerging after two months of COVID-19 isolation from his Delaware mansion basement. Wearing his COVID mask with matching dark glasses, he came out to lay a wreath for Memorial Day. According to the Daily Wire:
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden made his first in-person public appearance in over two months on Monday, appearing with former Second Lady Jill Biden near their Delaware home to lay a Memorial Day wreath at a veterans park.
It wasn't a pretty picture. His appearance was more like 'the thing that came from the crypt.' He looked like that guy saying 'help me' in the old movie 'The Fly,':
Last week, I visited a local shop in Camden, Maine, that caters largely to tourists. On my way out, I asked the owners how they were holding up. They, of course, replied that they are desperately concerned about their business and are just trying to survive — like most business owners across the country right now.
The entrepreneurs also said they were having a difficult time getting their employees to come back to work because they’re receiving close to $1,000 a week for not working. It’s a confusing and concerning problem for these business owners because they took the Paycheck Protection Program funds
Some companies are adding coronavirus surcharges to bills, infuriating customers enough to take their business elsewhere.
“Many customers are angry about the changes,” wrote Ted Rossman, an industry analyst at CreditCards.com. Rossman noted that roughly 86% of respondents from an American Express survey said they would stop patronizing a business if it applied surcharges to receipts.
A dentist in Florida charged patients $10 to help pay for the personal protective equipment worn by staff, which the mother of one patient felt she was not obligated to pay.
"I don’t feel that I’m required to pay that," she told a local news station in Jacksonville, Florida.
While dining rooms remain closed in the state, many Illinoisans are crossing the border to go out to eat.
Many restaurants in Illinois are preparing for outdoor dining starting on May 29, but indoor dining rooms must remain closed. As it stands now under Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s five-phase reopening plan, indoor dining rooms in Illinois won’t be able to open until the end of June.
Restaurants in Missouri have reported a steady flow of people coming over from Illinois to have a meal. The same holds true for Indiana.
Bonnie Wright, the co-owner of the Beef House in Covington, Indiana, said business has been great
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has changed its guidance once again, acknowledging new information on its website was confusing about the low risk of contracting COVID-19 from contaminated surfaces. The CDC is now saying coronavirus can “possibly” be spread on surfaces and objects, though the virus is mainly transmitted between people. This is not the first time the nation’s premier public health agency has had to reverse course on information related to the coronavirus pandemic, including the agency’s evolving guidance on whether a face mask should or should not be worn in public.(Snip) The CDC initially changed the information
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he will travel to Washington to meet with President Donald Trump on Wednesday and planned to discuss major investments in infrastructure as a way to jumpstart a U.S. economy devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.Cuomo also told a daily briefing on Tuesday he planned to accelerate major construction projects in his state, including the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport and a renovation and expansion of Penn Station in New York City.The Democratic governor, who has at times has traded barbs with Trump over the federal government’s pandemic response, said he would promote
Coronavirus is so 'perfectly adapted' to infect humans that the possibility it was made in a Chinese lab can't be ignored, Australian vaccine researchers conclude. Professor Nikolai Petrovsky said the virus was better at attaching itself to human cells than to any other animal, explaining why it has infected five million people. The vaccine expert warned the investigation into where COVID-19 started, as proposed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was as a result urgently needed and should have begun months ago.(Snip) Furthermore, viruses tend to get better at infecting new species as they adapt over time, but COVID-19 started 'completely optimised
One of the nation’s most prestigious national labs has developed a new fuel substitute for the same jet fuel that powers cruise missiles. Los Alamos National Labs has come up with a replacement fuel for JP-10 that uses corn bran and other feedstocks instead of petroleum products. The result is a fuel that can be sourced directly from America’s most plentiful crop, bypassing foreign sources.
The Tomahawk missile is one of the most plentiful missiles in the US military arsenal. Developed in the 1970s, Tomahawk was one of the first low-altitude, radar-evading cruise missiles to enter service, and today 145 U.S. Navy warships carry the missile daily
Crisis affects people in different ways. Among the more unsettling ones, you could point to images of armed civilians storming state capitals from Lansing to Raleigh, or perhaps that video that leaked over the weekend of a poolside bacchanal in the Ozarks. Trace these reactions to the COVID-19 epidemic out to their source, and you’ll find a legion of truthers, deniers and downplayers. Among them is defrocked virologist Judy Mikovits, the voice behind Plandemic, a controversial documentary that makes unfounded claims regarding COVID-19 as well as some patently discredited ones about vaccines. It was taken down from YouTube because it violated the streaming service’s standards,
In early April, Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, was speaking via Zoom to a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties. The economy had just been shut down, unemployment was spiking and some policymakers were predicting an era worse than the Great Depression. The economic carnage seemed likely to doom President Donald Trump’s chances at reelection.
Furman, tapped to give the opening presentation, looked into his screen of poorly lit boxes of frightened wonks and made a startling claim.
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” he said.
The number of Americans venturing out over the Memorial Day weekend has spiked to levels not seen since the coronavirus pandemic brought the United States to a grinding halt more than two months ago.Cellphone data from Apple's COVID-19 mobility trends report shows that the number of people out driving across the US increased by more than 25 percent on Saturday alone. The number of people out walking also increased on Saturday to levels not seen since mid-March when stay-at-home orders were put in place across most of the country. In comparison, the number of people driving and walking around dropped nearly 70 percent
This is why Biden has been hiding in his basement for months.Creepy Joe left his Delaware basement for the first time in over two months on Monday.And he looked like a weak fool with his face mask on.A video of 77-year-old Biden looking very frail sparked concerns over his health.Biden shuffled his feet and gripped his wife’s hand as he walked over to his car as he was leaving the veterans memorial in Delaware.One observer said, “People suffering from dementia often have a certain distinct walk.
Chicago saw its deadliest Memorial Day weekend in years, even as people hunker down under Illinois's stay-at-home order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Police said 10 people were shot and killed in the city, the highest total since 2015. At least 42 others were injured in shootings. NBC's local affiliate has a timeline of this weekend's shootings. Twelve people were shot and killed during Memorial Day weekend five years ago. Street pastor Donovan Price said the shootings are a result of some Chicago residents refusing to adapt to the new social distancing and quarantine guidelines.
While most of the U.S. has begun to reopen, some parts of the country remain under burdensome restrictions that can’t be justified by either science or logic.
Most of New York, Michigan and the Washington D.C. metro area remains under lockdown through at least Memorial Day weekend. Some beaches in Virginia and New York reopened over the weekend, but Democratic New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made it clear that swimming is forbidden, saying beachgoers who swim in the ocean will “be taken right out of the water.”“Obviously first and foremost, help make everyone remember don’t go in the water. You’re not supposed to go in the water,”
When the U.S. government first rolled out forgivable loans to small businesses in early April under the Paycheck Protection Program, loan officers at Bank of the West in Grapevine, Texas worked nights and weekends to process a tsunami of applications. But since those first few frantic weeks, demand has “just dried up,” said bank president Cindy Blankenship. On May 15 the bank stopped taking applications for PPP loans.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday that as states begin to reopen from coronavirus stay-at-home orders, “one of the most vivid gaps in American history” will be seen between the economies of red and blue states.
“In the red states, where you have pro-Trump governors, they're opening up,” Gingrich noted.
“In the blue states, like New York, where [Gov. Andrew] Cuomo is a total disaster, the gap between how many jobs we create in the red states and how many jobs we kill in the blue states by September will be amazing,
Hours before she received news that the country’s first reported COVID-19 death had occurred just outside Seattle, Mayor Jenny Durkan led local Girl Scouts in a downtown parade. That was Feb. 28. (snip) Today, the streets where the scouts marched are deserted, except for people in sleeping bags and tents who haven’t been housed, even amid the pandemic. (snip) But pressure is building at City Hall. As Seattle tentatively enters recovery mode, Durkan is working to distribute masks and boost testing capacity, drawing sharp criticism for her approach to homelessness from some corners, staring down a monster budget hole and contending with a push to tax big businesses.
Former CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter says hidden left-wing bias is a growing problem in the media and is threatening “social cohesion” in the United States.In an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal Monday, Sauter, who led CBS from 1982-83 and in 1986, slammed news outlets that maintain a veneer of objectivity and fairness while pushing reporting biased in favor of left-wing politics.Sauter began by recalling a conversation from 35 years ago when he insisted that the media at large was only tilted to the left and “could be corrected.” He goes on to say that his prediction was wrong and
The odds of a young healthy American catching and dying of the COVID virus are roughly 1 in 70,000 and going down. Their odds of dying of sunstroke are ten times greater. Their odds of dying in a car wreck or by suicide are a thousand times greater.
So why are many young healthy people afraid of dying of the virus? I have a theory.
It’s because fear is pleasurable. Bear with me.
A Memorial Day rally calling for an end to the Illinois stay-at-home order was broken up early by Chicago Police. Organizers on Monday gathered at Buckingham Fountain, calling the order to fight the coronavirus pandemic unconstitutional and demanding a reopening.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Police both said they respect First Amendment rights, but the rally posed a public health risk.
The mayor tweeted “Regarding today’s large unpermitted gathering at Millennium Park: while we respect 1st amendment rights, this gathering posed an unacceptable health risk and was dispersed. No matter where in the city you live, no one is exempt from @GovPritzker’s stay-at-home order.”
Donald Trump has retweeted a post mocking Joe Biden for wearing a face mask at Memorial Day commemorations while the president refused to don one at a ceremony in Virginia. The president took aim at his Democrat rival Monday evening, when he retweeted the post from Fox News political analyst Brit Hume.'This might help explain why Trump doesn’t like to wear a mask in public. Biden today,' the Tweet read, alongside a close-up shot of Biden sporting a dark face mask and sunglasses at a Memorial Day event. Biden and his wife Jill covered their faces to lay a wreath at a Delaware veterans park during his first trip out
Democrats are bracing for the political impact of lifted lockdown restrictions across the country and other measures that could lead to a boom in the U.S. economy following the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report. Jason Furman, one of former President Barack Obama's top economic advisers, gave a presentation to top Democratic strategists and donors last month. He shocked the group with his prognostication. “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country," he said, according to Politico. "Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken."
A retail worker in California was left with a bloody face after she claimed an irate customer attacked her because the store couldn't hold an item for her beyond 30 minutes. On May 6, Samantha Clarke was working at a Modesto-area Big 5 Sporting Goods store when a woman from a nearby city called and asked if they could hold a swimming pool for her. 'We told them that we would hold it for 30 minutes, they showed up 45 minutes later and the pool was gone,' said Clarke, according to ABC 10.(Snip) But Clarke wasn't prepared for the customer's alleged tantrum
Retired Army Green Beret Joe Kent stepped into the spotlight after his wife, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, paid the ultimate sacrifice while serving on the frontlines in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria last year.
He wanted to share her story — of a talented cryptologist who could speak five different languages and had served with special operations forces in the world’s toughest combat zones since 2012, a loving wife and mother.
But recently, Kent has taken on a new role as coalition board member of Military Families for Trump to get President Donald Trump re-elected,
University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel has nixed the return of football, unless on-campus classes have also restarted.
Some thought that the Wolverines could return whether the rest of the campus had reopened or not, but Schlissel shot that idea down, the Detroit News reported.
“If there is no on-campus instruction then there won’t be intercollegiate athletics, at least for Michigan,” Schlissel told the Wall Street Journal. He later added he has “some degree of doubt as to whether there will be college athletics (anywhere), at least in the fall.”
Schlissel also noted that however they decide to reopen the campus, that plan will stay intact for the rest of the school year.
Hobil Bravo-Perez, a 20-year-old illegal alien from Mexico, was arrested last year for allegedly sexually assaulting three underage girls in Shawano County, Wisconsin. This month, Bravo-Perez pleaded not guilty to six counts of child sex crimes with pre-trial hearings beginning in July. According to police, Bravo-Perez sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl by forcing her to have sex with him after contacting her through social media. Bravo-Perez has said he paid the underage girl $50 for sex.
On Memorial Day, the Democrats’ de facto candidate, Joe Biden, finally emerged from his basement hideaway to place a wreath at a Veterans’ Memorial in New Castle, Delaware (population 5,285). If we contrast Biden's appearance with Donald Trump’s look on Memorial Day, we can see that one man is a vital leader, and the other is a listless follower.
Biden wore a dark gray suit with a white shirt, and a white and gray tie. He hid the lower part of his face with an oversized black mask, and he wore dark sunglasses that blended almost seamlessly into the mask. Jill wore an unflattering black and white peplum dress,
The Dems will not allow any semblance of normalcy to return until Trump and recalcitrant Republicans in the Senate agree to bail out Democrat-run states facing fiscal insolvency. Democrat socialist policies have left states like California and Illinois with unsustainable pension obligations and exponentially growing deficits too dear for a shrinking tax base to sustain.
Buying votes ain't cheap.
Yet why would citizens, prudently residing in red states, acquiesce to paying for votes Democrats have bought in the past and wish to purchase in the future?
They would not unless forced to.
Democrat governors, in particular Newsom (Calif.), Pritzker (Ill.), Murphy (N.J.), and Cuomo (N.Y.), are like terrorists,
I think it is pretty clear now to all but the most klueless, given the bombshells and walls closing in of the past week, that the whole Trump Russia thing was a put-up job, that the Obama people, whether prompted by the Clinton campaign or President Obama himself, spied on the Trump campaign on a presumption about Russian spying. Predicates? We don’t need no stinkin’ predicates.
And the latest line on the pursuit of Michael Flynn is that he had dirt on the Obama Iran Deal and wanted to clean out the Augean stables at the intelligence community. So he had to be eliminated.
Here’s my objection to the whole Russia/Flynn thing.
The Civil War was America’s most costly war with some 360,222 Union and 258,000 Confederate lives lost. Many historians put the death toll higher, but regardless, the number of Civil War casualties exceeds the nation’s loss in all its other wars combined -- the two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnamese Wars and subsequent wars right up through conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Memorial Day had its origin as Decoration Day following that most horrible and costly war, dating back to April 25th, 1866 when a former chaplain in the Confederate Army accompanied a group of women from Columbus, Mississippi to Friendship Cemetery --
A book published 66 years ago and still in print is an essential reference for understanding most of the data that you see about the pandemic afflicting the world today. Written by Darrell Huff and illustrated by Irving Geis, How to Lie With Statistics is both sardonic and a serious lesson in the abuse of math for propaganda. Whether or not it was studied by our Trump-hating media anxious to make the US look bad, some of its lessons are being employed.
A few days ago, we learned that the mortality rate from the coronavirus is lower than touted by the “experts.”
According to Democrats, everyone will now need to vote by mail this Fall. They argue that traditional voting -- standing in lines at libraries and schools -- will cause a contagious outbreak or at least force voters to choose between democracy and health. So how will the coronavirus crisis affect national elections this November 3?
There is an interesting solution: Drive-through voting. Even Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) supported this within her plan under her name “curbside voting.” It works for banking.
A drive-through area could be set up in a parking lot or along the side of vacant buildings. Libraries and schools could be spared exposure.
We’ve listened intently as mainstream media outlets, both print and broadcast, have lectured us and the rest of America on the lifesaving virtues of the Wuhan virus lockdown. While it may well be true that it saved lives from the virus, what about the lives lost to the lockdown?
The economic devastation from the lockdown has had brutal consequences, in particular for small businesses, their owners and their often low-wage employees. With 38.6 million suddenly unemployed and applying for benefits, jobless rates shooting toward 20%, and bankruptcies crushing major industries, such as retailing, the near-term outlook is grim if the
Fox News, and other cable networks, run a COVID death count ticker on the side or bottom of the television screen just as they show the major stock indices during the business day. Why are they so obsessed with deaths from the Chinese virus? (snip) As states and cities reopen, expect each new death to be trumpeted by the media, with panel discussion by “experts” discussing Trump’s recklessness and disregard for American lives. Dr. Deborah Birx, has already noticed and it’s no coincidence that major media outlets are in no hurry to interview her lest she let the death count cat out of the bag.
Supermarket customers are paying more for beef than they have in decades during the coronavirus pandemic. But at the same time, the companies that process the meat for sale are paying farmers and ranchers staggeringly low prices for cattle.
Now, the Agriculture Department and prosecutors are investigating whether the meatpacking industry is fixing or manipulating prices.
The Department of Justice is looking at the four largest U.S. meatpackers — Tyson Foods, JBS, National Beef and Cargill — which collectively control about 85 percent of the U.S. market for the slaughter and packaging of beef, according to a person with knowledge of the probe. The USDA is also investigating the beef price fluctuations,
Believe her or not
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Believe it or not, what really counts in our gender-based battles is not the deeply fraught matter of "believing the woman," but exactly how far each political party will go in defense of its own man.
In all of these contests, the answer is "very," and all of these battles are fierce. In 1991, there was no chance in hell the Republican Party would give up Clarence Thomas, whose choice to replace civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall as the Supreme Court’s black justice had driven the left wing insane.
Since 1964, when Barry Goldwater voted against the civil rights bills of that era, the Republican, black voter had been a rare species,
The Illusion of Certainty
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The shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man from Georgia, has reignited the national debate about racial profiling. On February 23, Arbery entered an empty construction site in the city of Brunswick, lingering for several minutes before leaving. Shortly afterward, Gregory McMichael, a white ex-cop who lived down the street, noticed Arbery running. He grabbed his gun, enlisted his son Travis, and pursued.
After he and his father had chased Arbery in a truck for four minutes, Travis exited the driver’s side and confronted Arbery, shotgun in hand. The video of what followed, captured by William Bryan Jr., a neighbor aiding in the chase, leaves much to be desired.
A recent spate of mostly bad polls for President Trump has driven a narrative that he’s on his way out. Pundits have declared his reelection in “deep trouble,” and they have highlighted polls showing him “hemorrhaging older voters.” Even Republicans in swing states have raised alarms about how vulnerable Trump is to defeat. But in 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic rips through the world, the uncertainty is so great that it’s sillier than ever to read so much into polls this far out from the election.
To be clear, we aren’t attempting to ignore the polls that clearly show Trump’s risk of defeat.
What a spectacle is underway in Israel, where Prime Minister Netanyahu is being prosecuted by his own government for bribery and other crimes that he was formally alleged to have committed before he was re-elected to a third term. It’s a lesson in constitutional conundrums from a country that doesn’t have a constitution — and not just because Mr. Netanyahu has entered the dock with all saddlebags flapping in the breeze.
“Netanyahu’s Defense Strategy Is to Undermine His Accuser, the State of Israel,” is the way the poser was put in Israel’s leading liberal daily, Haaretz, as the trial was getting underway.
You can’t say you were not warned.
As President Trump has been saying for years now, “What have you got to lose?”
And then along comes Joe Biden to remind us all that when it comes to the ancient, petrified forest of Washington Olde Guard, America really does have nothing to lose.
Certainly, Mr. Biden should know. For nearly a half-century, Mr. Biden has been one of the most revered white-haired experts in Washington. It’s why he got picked to be Barack Obama’s vice president.
Mr. Biden’s specialty all these decades has been foreign policy, about which he has been entirely, 100% wrong 100% of the time.
HIALEAH GARDENS, Florida — Cuban flags hang from the walls and model planes seem to float in the atrium as bright Florida sunshine pours into the Hialeah Gardens Museum Honoring Brigade 2506, a memorial to the 1,200 CIA-trained Cuban exiles who stormed Cuba’s shores in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961.
“Of the 106 who died, only 67 died in combat and the rest, how did they die?” said Felix Rodriguez, 79, to the Washington Examiner in a three-hour Spanish-language interview in his thick Cuban accent Thursday.
The Bay of Pigs veteran and famed CIA operative proceeded to describe every instance of death: on boats, in planes,
Melania Trump looked stunning in her Gucci coat on Memorial Day.On Monday (May 25), the First Lady stepped out and joined President Donald Trump at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. They paid respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.Melania was stunning in her $3,500 double-breasted wool coat designed by Gucci. She paired her coat with matching white heels, Daily Mail reported.The FLOTUS watched on while the POTUS participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery in honor of the members of the U.S. military who have lost their lives. Vice President Mike Pence, and his wife Karen Pence, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and his wife Leah Esper,
Rather than focus on COVID-19 or the economic recovery, California liberals insist on pushing their pet issues. The “stimulus” bill rammed through the House this month by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco was a liberal wish list of subsidies and spending. Now other California Democrats are ramming through an effort to repeal the state’s ban on racial preferences.
Two things often happen when a single political party dominates a state the way Democrats dominate California. First, an echo chamber of the dominant party convinces its leaders they can steamroll over any opposition. Second, that conviction leads to political overreach.
Caucasian Americans are now only 19 percent of UC students,
‘I Can Always Go Back to the Other
Side:’ How Jane Roe Demanded
a Raise From Anti-Abortion Activists replies
Side:’ How Jane Roe Demanded
a Raise From Anti-Abortion Activists replies
For years, the woman behind Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was believed to be one of the most effective activists in the anti-abortion movement. But in a documentary released Friday, Norma McCorvey, the “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade, revealed what she called her “deathbed confession”: It was all an act.
She simply acted the part of an abortion opponent in public, McCorvey said in the documentary, “AKA Jane Roe,” because she was paid.
“I took their money and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say. That’s what I’d say,” she said, adding,
What’s more American than taking a walk on the boardwalk during Memorial Day weekend?
And what’s more fitting for these times than social media scolds yelling at the middle-class folks who do it?
One particular picture from Ocean City, Maryland, this weekend seems to show a totally packed boardwalk. This has led to all sorts of scolding. Here’s a Reuters congressional reporter cursing the walkers for lacking the self-control to stay inside and on Twitter, like responsible folks should do.
Notwithstanding the need to call out Louis Farrakhan, despise Al Sharpton even more, and contemn Tamika Mallory of “The Women’s March” as the disciple of both, we can only support all Americans of all races, creeds, religions, and ethnicities as we all endeavor to achieve our respectively huge slice of the great American pie. In capitalism and with free markets unhindered by paternalistic government, the pie is big enough for everyone. As we grow, the pie grows unless an Ocasio-Hyphen chooses to kill 25,000 jobs for her district. It is not bleeding-heart liberalism, but deep blue conservatism to believe that all people are created equal, in the image of G-d,
Is there anything more tedious than the press complaining about how it’s treated?
After grousing that Stephanie Grisham, President Trump’s former press secretary, never held a formal briefing, the media can’t stand that Kayleigh McEnany, her successor, has made those briefings too contentious.
McEnany steamrolls, she dodges, she lectures reporters on the questions they should be asking. It’s that last point that riles some journalists. “Indefensible and grotesque,” said Jonah Goldberg to Chris Wallace on Fox News. “I have to say that if Kayleigh McEnany had told Sam Donaldson and me what questions we should ask, that would not have gone well,” Wallace said.
Former Vice President Joe Biden left home for the first time in months on Monday to lay a wreath at a veterans memorial near his home in Delaware.The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, wearing a black mask, and his wife, Jill, laid a wreath of white flowers and bowed their heads in silence at Delaware Memorial Bridge Veteran’s Memorial Park. Biden has been running his 2020 campaign out of the basement of his home in Wilmington since mid-March when he canceled a March 10 rally in Cleveland because of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, he has appeared for interviews on news programs, late-night talk shows and virtual campaign events via
President Trump blasted Jeff Sessions once again this weekend. He tweeted:
3 years ago, after Jeff Sessions recused himself, the Fraudulent Mueller Scam began. Alabama, do not trust Jeff Sessions. He let our Country down. That’s why I endorsed Coach Tommy Tuberville (@TTuberville), the true supporter of our #MAGA agenda!
There’s nothing new here or in Trump’s follow-up venting. What’s new is that this time Sessions, whose chances of defeating coach Tuberville reportedly are slim, fired back:
Look, I know your anger, but recusal was required by law. I did my duty & you’re damn fortunate I did.
NORCROSS, Georgi— Vice President Mike Pence told Breitbart News that the Trump administration is “not going to tolerate” social media and big tech companies aiming to silence conservative voices in the 2020 election.Asked during an exclusive interview on Friday about big tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others downplaying conservative voices, Pence said that President Donald Trump has “made it very clear” this type of behavior is unacceptable. Pence’s interview aired on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel.“Well, the president has made it very clear that we are not going to tolerate censorship on the Internet and social media against conservatives,”
Recently, we got the welcome news that one of the most hallowed shrines of American pop culture, Graceland, Elvis Presley’s estate near Memphis, Tennessee, is once again open to visitors. Many other attractions will soon follow suit.
This is a fabulous development for the millions of Americans who work in the tourism and hospitality industries, but more than that, it is food for America’s soul. After all, when we travel far from home we often find out who we truly are.
One of the most tragic aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been that it has robbed people of aspects of their humanity. Grandparents have been separated from their grandkids.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo admitted Monday that coronavirus projections from experts were all wrong -- and he's getting out of the business of speculating because of it.
Cuomo said he can't predict when the hospitalization and death rate numbers will drop to the necessary threshold required for reopening certain regions because as he put it, "we all failed" at predicting.
"Now, people can speculate. People can guess. I think next week, I think two weeks, I think a month," Cuomo told reporters on Memorial Day. "I'm out of that business because we all failed at that business. Right? All the early national experts. Here's my projection model. Here's my projection model.
Joe Biden is presented by Democrats and the media as a moderate, but that’s simply not true. His tax plan is ridiculously expensive. It would spend trillions more than even Hillary Clinton’s tax plan in 2016. Robert Frank of CNBC recently laid it all out.The Washington Free Beacon reports: CNBC Reporter: Biden Tax Plan ‘Most Expensive’ in Recent History. “The truth is that Joe Biden, even though he’s portrayed as a moderate, is offering the most expensive Democratic tax plan that we’ve seen from any Democratic candidate in recent history,”
A Georgia man accused of attacking two women on Sunday outside an Athens store allegedly blamed coronavirus stress as a “precipitating factor” before the alleged attack. Eric Keith Mitchell, 39, allegedly attacked the two women—recent graduates from the University of Georgia—as they left a store. They were in serious condition and hospitalized, police said. Police said Mitchell was found with a razor knife shortly after the incident. He allegedly told police from the Athens-Clarke County Police Department that the stress from “COVID-19 concerns” led to the attack. He was charged with aggravated battery and aggravated assault.
Americans everywhere are tired of the lockdown, and North Carolina racing fans made that abundantly clear yesterday.
According to the Charlotte Observer, Ace Speedway opened up in defiance of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper’s orders to stay locked down, prompting hundreds of racing fans to show up and wait nearly two hours to get in. As the Observer reported, the scene looked as if there never was a pandemic with people standing close together and hanging out as people normally would:
They lined up more than two hours before the first race Saturday at Ace Speedway,
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer faced backlash from Republican lawmakers after a reported request from her husband to get the family's boat out on the water before Memorial Day weekend -- far from their home in Lansing.
Whitmer, a Democrat, famously has imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the country, sparking frequent protests. What's more, she's told people not living in Northern Michigan to stay away from vacation spots there during the holiday weekend.
In Facebook posts no longer visible to the public, NorthShore Dock LLC and its owner, Tad Dowker, focused on what Dowker said was a request last week by Whitmer's husband, Marc Mallory.
Five things I have learned from COVID-19:
1. People Overreact.
In the absence of knowing what to do, people need to do something.
The masses feel better when they are preparing to defend themselves against an invisible threat, even if this makes no sense whatsoever. Like pregnant mums writing a birthing plan, only for it to go out the window the minute you realize pushing something the size of a watermelon out of something the size of a doughnut is going to sting a bit.
When the threat of coronavirus came, ordinarily sane people were caught doing the strangest things: freezing onions, fighting over toilet paper, putting beans in their loft space.