Posts on Wednesday, May 27, 2020
The federal government says it is reviewing a Chinese mining company’s proposed $207 million buyout of a struggling gold mining company in Nunavut under the Investment Canada Act, as a high-profile case against a Chinese executive in Canada reaches a crucial point. Shandong Gold Mining Co. Ltd., a Chinese state-owned enterprise that’s listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, announced earlier this month it would purchase Toronto-based TMAC Resources Inc., which operates a mine near Cambridge Bay that has been beset by operational challenges. Ottawa declined to provide any details (snip) but lawyers who practise in this area said the government can easily invoke national security concerns
Protests continued into Wednesday night in south Minneapolis, where Chopper 5 captured video of apparent looting at a nearby Target and other area businesses. A fire has engulfed one business as well.
The protests are happening in response to the death of George Floyd, who was killed Monday night after an incident that involved Minneapolis Police officers. All four officers involved in the arrest were fired on Tuesday.
A Canadian court has ruled that the case of senior Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, who is fighting extradition to the United States, can go forward. A judge found that the case meets the threshold of double criminality - meaning the charges would be crimes in both the US and Canada. The US wants Ms Meng to stand trial on charges linked to the alleged violation of US sanctions against Iran. Her case has created a rift between China and Canada. Her lead defence lawyer, Richard Peck, has argued in court that Canada is effectively being asked "to enforce US sanctions". But Associate Chief Justice Heather Holmes ruled
There’s a good chance the coronavirus will never go away. Even after a vaccine is discovered and deployed, the coronavirus will likely remain for decades to come, circulating among the world’s population. Experts call such diseases endemic — stubbornly resisting efforts to stamp them out. Think measles, HIV, chickenpox. It is a daunting proposition — a coronavirus-tinged world without a foreseeable end. But experts in epidemiology, disaster planning and vaccine development say embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response. The long-term nature of covid-19, they say, should serve as a call to arms for
Media Becomes Triggered After Kayleigh
McEnany Fact Checks Twitter Over Mail-In
Ballot Fraud Claims replies
McEnany Fact Checks Twitter Over Mail-In
Ballot Fraud Claims replies
My RedState colleague Nick Arama wrote earlier today about how Twitter is now “fact checking” President Trump’s tweets, starting with two he posted on Tuesday about how mail-in ballot voting is ripe for fraud, and has the potential of “rigging” the 2020 presidential election.
As Nick noted, a number of high-profile conservatives fact checked Twitter in response, debunking their erroneous claim that Trump’s statements about voting by mail were “unsubstantiated.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was another who pushed back hard against Twitter’s dismissal of Trump’s remarks on mail-in ballots, posting a series of tweets on the issue.
Joe Biden might need some Pepto-Bismol next time he goes on camera. During a digital campaign event with Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, it sounded as though somebody broke wind as Biden was in the middle of criticizing Republicans' response to states teetering on the verge of bankruptcy because of losses of revenue due to the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. (Snip) It was not immediately clear who, if anyone, actually cut the cheese, but once the clip hit Twitter, some users began speculating it was Biden. The incident was reminiscent of an interview that one of Biden's former
Appearing Wednesday on the Fox News Channel, network senior judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano said he will “defend to the death” Twitter’s right to fact check President Donald Trump.(Video) A partial transcript is as follows:SANDRA SMITH: There’s so many questions. You look out into the social media atmosphere about this debate over social media, and Twitter now fact-checking the president. Can they do this? ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The short answer is yes, the longer answer is that the president is right about the bias in social media
Lost in the shuffle of the Memorial Day holiday weekend — unusual, though it was — an Illinois judge unloaded on Governor J.B. Pritzker’s still-in-effect stay-at-home order this past Friday. I’ve written previously regarding the significant distinction between Chicago — and even Springfield — and “outstate” or “downstate” Illinois. This judge’s decision further highlights that great divide.
The back story: State Rep. Darren Bailey, a Republican from the state’s 109th District, filed a lawsuit against Pritzker in April, asserting that Pritzker’s stay-at-home order unfairly affected the residents of his home county. Clay County Judge Michael McHaney issued a temporary restraining order in that matter, but only as to Bailey himself,
Numerous former aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have reportedly transitioned to working as lobbyists for companies which have sought benefits from legislation related to the coronavirus, making a bundle of money for their firms in the process.The Washington Free Beacon examined federal disclosure records and found at least seven of those aides, including Pelosi’s former chief of staff, Nadeam Elshami, senior policy adviser Anne MacMillan, and special assistant Shanti Stanton, have represented over 50 different entities in 2020. The Beacon added, “Their firms received over $2 million from these clients during this time. These fees were for lobbying on multiple issues in addition to coronavirus legislation and policies.”
Nancy Pelosi: ‘Every Crisis’ Including
Coronavirus Is an Opportunity to
Advance Leftist Agenda replies
Coronavirus Is an Opportunity to
Advance Leftist Agenda replies
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said during a press conference on Wednesday that “every crisis” is an opportunity to advance a leftist agenda.“We have to open the economy, we have to do so in a way that gives more opportunity for access to care, to credit, to opportunity,” Pelosi said during a press conference regarding her coronavirus phase four bill, the HEROES Act.“Just as Mr. Clyburn said, this is an opportunity, every crisis is,” Pelosi added.The House leader referenced U.S. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who said before the passage of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill in March that the bill was a “tremendous opportunity
President Trump is signing an executive order Wednesday aimed at social media companies, a White House official said. Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters that the president is signing the order “pertaining to social media,” but she could not provide details. The president has criticized Twitter this week for posting, for the first time, fact-checking items to his tweets about mail-in voting. Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said Wednesday that Twitter engaged in “predatory practice” when it marked Mr. Trump’s tweets with fact-checking labels. “There’s no question that Twitter, YouTube, Facebook engage in their own censorship,” Mr. Giuliani said
Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to oversee the Trump-Russia probe, will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 3, the panel announced Wednesday.The open hearing will be the first to be held as part of the committee’s sweeping review of the FBI’s investigation and surveillance of the Trump campaign. Sen. Lindsey Graham has set a vote for June 4 to subpoena dozens of current and former government officials involved in various aspects of the investigation. Rosenstein, who left the Justice Department on May 11, 2019,
Ivanka Trump was joined by her daughter Arabella and son Joseph when she stepped out on Wednesday ahead of their flight to Florida to attend Elon Musk's historic SpaceX rocket launch.The first daughter and her two eldest children were seen leaving their Washington, D.C. home a little after 9:30 in the morning, with all three of them wearing protective face masks. Ivanka, 38, donned a white mask with yellow flowers to match her $1,790 midi dress by Lela Rose. She looked ready for summer in the white button-down dress,
Bill Clinton is accused of having an affair with Ghislaine Maxwell during trips they took on pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's private jet, an explosive new book claims. The details of the alleged affair between the former president and the British socialite are detailed in a new book - A Convenient Death: The Mysterious Demise of Jeffrey Epstein. In an excerpt of the book, obtained by the New York Post, sources said Clinton would have sex with Maxwell during overseas trips on Epstein's Lolita Express plane and he would visit her at her Manhattan townhouse. The former president has denied having the affair with Maxwell.
COVID Rolls Downhill In Wyoming: The
American People Are Making The Hard
Calls When Our Leaders Won’t replies
American People Are Making The Hard
Calls When Our Leaders Won’t replies
JACKSON, WYO.—You can drive through the sprawling hills and snowy peaks of southeastern Idaho and cross the state line at Freedom, Wyoming — just north of Old Man Mountain. Turn left there, and take the two-lane Route 89 past horses, barns, ranch homes and log cabins until you meet a friend every fly fisherman in the country pines for: the Snake River. Follow that river east, winding through the 9,000-foot mountains until you find a valley that hearty mountain men of the 1820s, like David Jackson, called the hole. We know it as Jackson Hole, and to many, it’s the most beautiful place in the country.
The unemployment in the United States today is at 15%.There are over 39 million Americans who have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus.And yet on Wednesday nine US Republican Senators wrote President Donald Trump telling him not to restrict work visas for foreignors.Lindsey Graham was one of nine RINOs who want to bring in more foreign workers when there are 39 million Americans out of work.These people are soulless.These RINOs insist it will be good for the economy.
Toll prices on the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway will increase dramatically beginning Sept. 13. Turnpike Exit 19W on the western spur in the Meadowlands will also be getting a toll, following unanimous 7-0 decisions by the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. The commissioners unanimously approved increases of 36% on the turnpike and 27% on the parkway to help pay for what they said will be $24 billion in infrastructure projects. The decision came around the same time that the South Jersey Transportation Authority approved toll hikes for the Atlantic City Expressway.(Snip) The average Turnpike toll goes from $3.50 to $4.80.
Left-wing “explainer” website Vox reports Wednesday that leading billionaires in Silicon Valley are joining forces to build a digital campaign around former Vice President Joe Biden, who is holed up in his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
Biden and the Democrats are considered far behind their rivals in building digital tools for the 2020 presidential campaign — and Biden’s technological ineptitude has become a subject of public mockery.
So others are stepping in, according to Theodore Schleifer of Vox’s “Recode”:
One of the more dire statistics coming out of the mountains of data we’ve accumulated about the novel Coronavirus is the fact that close to half of all the deaths in the United States from the disease took place in nursing homes. That figure applies to New York State, one of the hardest hit regions in the country. And as time has gone on, increasing attention has been paid to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s executive order from March 25 stating that nursing homes could not refuse admission to patients, even if they tested positive for the virus. See Also: One the people in a phase
Anthony Fauci on Wednesday said there's no evidence that shows the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is effective at treating COVID-19.
"Clearly the scientific data is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy for it," Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease doctor, said during a CNN interview.
Fauci said evidence also shows the likelihood that the drug can cause severe irregular heart rhythms.
"There was suspicion of that for a while, but as data comes in, it becomes more clear," Fauci said.
The pronouncements mark Fauci's strongest warnings yet against the drug and puts him at odds with President Trump, who has embraced the drug as a "game changer" and a "miracle."
A copy of the since-canceled contact tracing contract Michigan Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration executed with a Democrat operative’s consulting firm, obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, shows the firm would have been paid to recruit 400 volunteers to collect medical information from state residents.
The contract was signed April 20, 2020, between the Michigan Public Health Institute and Great Lakes Community Engagement, a nonprofit organization under the control of Mike Kolehouse, a Democrat campaign consultant.
Hollywood Celebrates Twitter Fact Checking
Trump on Vote By Mail: ‘Welcome
to Accountability B**ch’ replies
Trump on Vote By Mail: ‘Welcome
to Accountability B**ch’ replies
Hollywood celebrities are gloating over Twitter’s decision to slap President Donald Trump with a “fact check” of his recent tweets about vote by mail. Stars including Rob Reiner, Dave Bautista, George Takei, and Alyssa Milano have voiced their approval of Twitter’s actions against the president.Twitter has appended a link to the bottom of two tweets from President Trump, encouraging people to “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” The link takes users to a Twitter landing page that calls the president’s claims about potential voter fraud “unsubstantiated.”
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The launch of a SpaceX rocket ship with two NASA astronauts on a history-making flight into orbit has been called off with 16 minutes to go in the countdown because of the danger of lightning.
Liftoff is rescheduled for Saturday.
The spacecraft was set to blast off Wednesday afternoon for the International Space Station, ushering in a new era in commercial spaceflight and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.
Ever since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian rockets to carry astronauts to and from the space station.
Pompeo declares that Hong Kong is no
longer autonomous from China,
threatening trade with U.S. replies
longer autonomous from China,
threatening trade with U.S. replies
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reported to Congress on Wednesday that Hong Kong was no longer autonomous from China, a move that could jeopardize the special administrative region’s favorable trade relationship with the U.S. and open up Chinese officials to sanctions.
The State Department was required to issue a determination on Hong Kong’s autonomy under pro-democracy legislation passed late last year. The law also requires the president to impose sanctions on foreigners who undermine “fundamental freedoms and autonomy in Hong Kong.”(Snip)The proposed law from China’s National People’s Congress would effectively bypass Hong Kong’s own legislature and targets acts of sedition against the central government in Beijing.
A Seattle judge has dismissed a lawsuit from a little-known advocacy organization that hoped to bar Fox News Channel from transmitting its popular primetime opinion programs to its large cable-news audience.
The Washington state group known as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics, or WASHLITE, filed a suit in Superior Court of Washington State in April, calling for an injunction that would keep Fox News from “publishing further and false and deceptive content” about the coronavirus pandemic. Several Fox News opinion hosts in prior weeks questioned the level
Joe Biden Oddly Rants That He’ll Break
a Law Democrats Relentlessly
Accused Republicans of Breaking replies
a Law Democrats Relentlessly
Accused Republicans of Breaking replies
Joe Biden hasn’t been thinking things through, though that’s a common theme. Just yesterday, he blamed the interviewer for his racist “you ain’t black” comment, if that gives you an idea of how things have been going lately. He was talking to CNN, so that meant no push back ensued. Meanwhile, in a public comment yesterday, Biden had this to say. See if you can spot the problem. (Snip) Biden today, per pooler @JTHVerhovek : " on the day I am officially elected, before I'm sworn in -- even though he'll probably contest we didn't win -- I'm going to immediately have to be on the phone with key European and Asian leaders to tell them America's back."
Jeffrey Epstein's surveillance cameras were part of a 'blackmail scheme' meant to extort his powerful friends, a major new documentary about the pedophile claims.
Netflix's Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich makes the bombshell claim that will add to the intrigue surrounding his death last August while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. There has long been speculation that Epstein had all his properties under surveillance but Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), one of Epstein's most prominent victims, revealed in the four-part documentary it was used as an insurance policy.
Late last week the FBI document that started the Trump-Russia collusion fiasco was publicly released. It hasn’t received a lot of attention but it should, because not too long from now this document likely will be blown up and placed on an easel as Exhibit A in a federal courtroom.
The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, will rightly point out that the document that spawned three years of political misery fails to articulate a single justifiable reason for starting the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation.
Those of us who have speculated there was insufficient cause for beginning the investigation could not have imagined the actual opening document was this feeble.
The cascade of tents hitting San Francisco’s liberal Haight-Ashbury has stunned merchants and residents alike, and led to an outcry over the city’s decision to set up a “safe sleeping site” at one of the neighborhood’s busiest intersections. “We have had a problem with homelessness for some time, but this is the first time we are seeing tents in the neighborhood,” said resident Michelle Leighton, spokeswoman for Safe Healthy Haight, a neighborhood group formed this month to respond to the city’s plan to put a sanctioned tent camp on the site of the old McDonald’s restaurant at Haight and Stanyan
A Virginia man who fled the country in 2012 and was suspected of trying to recruit men to join the terrorist group al-Shabaab was indicted in a federal court on a charge of conspiring to provide material support to the terrorist group based in Somalia, prosecutors said. Liban Haji Mohamed of Alexandria, Virginia, is a Somali-born naturalised American citizen who drove a cab in northern Virginia. He first came to the FBI's attention in 2010 with the arrest of Zachary Adam Chesser, at the time a 20-year-old Virginian who became enthralled with extremist Islamist views as a young man
The two astronauts blasting off today to the International Space Station in the first such voyage since 2011 are best friends who both married fellow astronauts.Bob Behnken, 49, from Saint Ann, Missouri, and Doug Hurley, 53, from Apalachin, New York, are at the helm of SpaceX's first ever crewed spaceflight. The pair are due to leave Cape Canaveral at 4.33pm EDT, in a historic mission which unites NASA and SpaceX.With President Donald Trump and his wife Melania watching, plus Mike Pence, the two men will become the first to fly from American soil to the ISS in nine years.
Twitter added a “fact check” label to President Donald Trump’s tweets raising widely-held concerns with mail-in voting fraud earlier today, but it has failed to apply a similar standard to repeated falsehoods by elected Democrats, the mainstream media, and Joe Biden.Unlike Facebook, which gives itself plausible deniability for fact-checking bias by relying on “third party fact checkers” (almost all left-leaning) to pick and choose what to fact-check and what to ignore, Twitter made the decision to fact-check Trump’s tweet itself,
RUSH: Everybody’s jumping all over Trump. I got a headline here on Drudge: “Twitter Apologizes for Trump Tweets.” This is about Trump tweeting that Scarborough murdered somebody, and a lot of people say, “What is Trump doing? Why is he punching down? Why is he wasting time on Scarborough?”(Snip)What about what Trump’s been accused of for three years? Treason, being a traitor, lying about all kinds of stuff. Flynn! What they have done to Donald Trump and his family! Maybe Trump’s just dosing out some medicine. “Okay, Joe, how does it feel?”
SEATTLE—The first word Seattle political consultant Dayna Lurie had that someone filed for unemployment benefits in her name was when her boss called.“Did you quit without telling me?” he asked. “We got an unemployment form from the state of Washington saying you don’t work here anymore.”It turned out that, like thousands of Washington state residents, Lurie’s identity was used by criminals seeking to capitalize on a flood of legitimate unemployment claims by sneaking in fraudulent ones.Washington’s race to help newly laid-off residents as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the economy left it vulnerable to such scams, and last week officials hinted at the scope of the damage done:
Federal and state prosecutors in West Virginia announced Tuesday that it they had charged a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier with attempted fraud for allegedly tampering with requests for vote-by-mail absentee ballots.
(Snip)
Thomas Cooper, 47, of Dry Fork, stands charged with attempting to defraud the residents of West Virginia of a fair election. An affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint states Cooper fraudulently altered eight absentee ballot requests (Snip)changed the party affiliation on five from Democrat to Republican.(Snip)
Cooper accessed the ballot requests through his employment as a rural mail carrier. He was responsible for mail delivery in the three towns from which the tampered requests were mailed –
President Trump indicated he would take action against Twitter after it affixed fact-check labels on his tweets.“Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!” he tweeted Wednesday. Hours earlier, Trump threatened to regulate or shut down social media companies because conservatives felt their voices were being censored by the platforms. Twitter placed the label on the president’s tweets for the first time Tuesday when he tweeted about mail-in voting in California.
Just as the left attempts to sell us on the idea of solid mail-in voting for all future elections in the wake of the coronavirus, out comes the first arrest for mail-in ballot fraud.
According to the Washington Times' Stephen Dinan:
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday lodged mail-fraud charges against a postal worker they say altered absentee ballot requests in last month’s primary election.
Thomas Cooper, 47, admitted to changing information on the requests for ballots — including five where he switched the party primary from Democrat to Republican, according to investigators. He told them it was a joke.
The charges were announced the same day that President Trump renewed his attack on mail-in voting,
Activist Shaun King has botched his attempt to recreate abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ newspaper, The North Star, as an online venture—sparking renewed scrutiny over his financial dealings, according to a report Tuesday. King’s new media outlet—which was lauded by such celebs as Susan Sarandon and Megan Mullally—has pulled in between $60,000 and $625,000 a month, depending on various figures he’s provided, the Daily Beast said. Yet it has failed to deliver on nearly every one of his promises, which included building “multiple studios’’ and “hiring nearly 50 world class journalists,” the site said. King (inset), a former New York City columnist
In the age of instant news, do we even need a daily White House press briefing?
The latest from the talking heads club is that some, from Chris Wallace to Jonah Goldberg, find Kayleigh McEnany a little "Indefensible And Grotesque."
I've seen a couple of Kaleigh's performances and it's hard to think of her as "grotesque." She is self-assured, but grotesque?
After all, this is a group of reporters who ask questions like comparing the pandemic death totals to Vietnam casualties or another blamed the president because someone listened to him in February and died of the virus.
Hopefully, many of the things that lay heavy upon the nation right now will be in our collective rear-view mirror in the near future. These things include constant mention of pandemic and crisis, hourly radio reports and TV news reports of coronavirus infections and deaths, face masks, the pronouncements of "experts" like the little gnome man and the scarf lady, and ubiquitous signs and messages that implore us to stay home and stay safe (OBEY!)
All of this is aimed at creating and reinforcing a state of fear and panic because scared people are easier to manipulate.
Wait, What? Biden Blames His ‘You Ain’t
Black’ Remark on Charlamagne tha God,
Makes It Even Worse replies
Black’ Remark on Charlamagne tha God,
Makes It Even Worse replies
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden actually did a real interview in person today with CNN’s Dana Bash.(Snip)Bash noted that Biden apologized saying he was being “cavalier” but that in the same interview he had also claimed to be endorsed by the NAACP “every time I’ve run” which the NAACP refuted and Bash said plainly, “isn’t true.”(Snip)Biden’s response? He basically avoids answering why he lied about the NAACP endorsing him, simply saying the remarks were a “mistake.” Deliberate lying isn’t a “mistake.” But then he goes on to blame Charlamagne. “I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy with him, he was being a wise guy
Is COVID-19 fading away?
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The Daily Mail (U.K.) says a technical report from Singapore predicts that COVID-19 will be gone in the U.S. by Nov. 11, the U.K. by Sept. 30, Italy by Oct. 24.
Maybe that's why the heralded Oxford University vaccine development group is getting nervous. According to this account reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, the virus is disappearing, creating a panic among the vaccine developers.
In fact the virus is fading so rapidly that "Professor Adrian Hill said an upcoming Oxford vaccine trial, involving 10,000 volunteers, threatened to return "no result" because of low transmission of COVID-19 in the community."
"It is a race, yes.
We have gotten a nasty preview of it during the Coronavirus epidemic. We’ve experienced empty shelves, food shortages, limits on what you can buy, and also the attack on civil liberties, on freedom of assembly, on religious liberty, on privacy. So we’ve endured on a temporary basis what, under socialism, we are likely to endure on a permanent basis. Yet socialism has somehow entered the mainstream of political debate. Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, we have these strange socialist characters — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Bernie Sanders tyrannical regime of human exploitation.
The battle lines on the issue of ending the economic shutdown are drawn more sharply each week. The terror campaign conducted by the media when the coronavirus outbreak began effectively compelled President Trump and most governors to follow the advice of the audible scientists and “flatten the curve” with a comprehensive shutdown requiring huge numbers of people to stay at home.
As the unemployment figures that resulted mounted swiftly toward 40 million, the American Left, now including almost all the official Democrats and almost all the national political media, became instantly addicted to the prospect of holding the president responsible at the election in November for creating an immense economic depression.
Jerry Nadler, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and 11 other New York members of the House of Representatives have sent a letter to NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo asking him to release prisoners — to protect them from the Wuhan virus. A “significant amount” of them, no less.
(Snip)By April 10th, the number of prisoners released from NYC jails due to the virus grew to more than 1,500. Six days later, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city was “buckling down,” after having experienced “some recidivism” among released criminals.
Unbelievably, de Blasio called the crimes committed by previously-convicted criminals “unconscionable”:
Today is a historic day. At roughly 4:30pm Eastern time, a rocket will blast off from launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marks two significant milestones. First, it will be the first flight into orbit of American astronauts on American rockets from American soil since the end of the Space Shuttle era in 2011. Second, it will be the first time that American astronauts will launch into space aboard a craft engineered and built by a private company as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program.Two astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, are going through final preparations
Reopen America Now!
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Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, was a beautiful sunny day. Mary and I left our West Virginia home to make the 40-mile trek to Walmart and Home Depot in Virginia. We drove past a Virginia megachurch which usually has state cops directing traffic for the congregation. The parking lot was empty with a large “closed” sign. Meanwhile, Walmart and Home Depot parking lots were packed. Around 50% of shoppers wore masks. Absurdly, I saw toddlers wearing masks, which were particularly annoying.Professor Dolores J. Cahill, PhD is a highly credentialed and respected Immunologist and Molecular Biologist. Prof. Cahill, world-renowned Dr. Russel Blaylock, Dr. Judy Mikovits, and countless other scientists around the world
If you love seeing progressive, phony propagandists devastatingly embarrassed, this video, less than a minute in length, is a moment to save and savor. And send to you friends who are cowering in fear of encountering a mask-free human being while outdoors in the sunshine, where coronavirus transmission is almost impossible unless French kissing somebody.
It happened during a live shot in which anchor Katy Tur was expressing shock (“Are the people out there are just not worried, Cal?”)
Reading a weekend story in Campus Reform helped us see more clearly what we’ve been witnessing for decades. The political left is driven by an urge to supervise every aspect of our lives. It’s a corrosive impulse that shouldn’t be accepted anywhere in a free nation, let alone practiced. The backlash needs to begin now. If not, our liberty will eventually be overrun.
The story is from Michigan State University, which published an article claiming that video conferencing is full of “unconscious bias.” In it, MSU social science professor Amy Bonomi says:
Unconscious bias includes using language, symbolism and nonverbal
As soon as the blue calamintha bee arrived on the scene, scientists worried it might be gone for good.
The indigo insect was last spotted in central Florida in 2016, five years after it was first identified. But this spring, just as Americans began to hunker down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rare blue bees, known scientifically as Osmia calaminthae, were rediscovered in the same region foraging on Ashe's calamint, a dainty violet flower that blooms in certain scrub habitats.
Chase Kimmel of the Florida Museum of Natural History confirmed the bees’ survival in March. At first, he couldn’t believe his own eyes.
An Open Letter to the D.C. Right
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You’ve shrugged off Obama’s culpability. And in doing so, you’ve set yourself against liberty and justice. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the sight before me is a sorry thing indeed. I’m addressing this to several of you whom I know in Washington, D.C. Not all of you, but some of you. I’ve known you for decades. You’re think-tankers, government officials, political journalists, and pundits. Some of you have been all these things. For a long while, I thought you were the good guys. You talked about individual liberty. Some of you identified as conservatives, others as libertarians, still others as classical liberals.
Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting Joe Scarborough somehow murdered a young woman who died of natural causes nearly 20 years ago are reprehensible. This is in no way because these tweets defame Scarborough. It’s pretty hard to feel bad for a guy whose media presence enabled Trump’s political rise to the point he openly flirted with running as his vice president before making a comic heel turn against Trump. (In fact, back when Scarborough was playing footsie with Trump, left-wing blogs were trafficking in this repugnant conspiracy.) Trump’s tweets are awful because of how they have thrust the deceased girl’s memory and her family into the limelight.
This letter written
The staggering American death toll from the coronavirus, now approaching 100,000, has touched every part of the country, but the losses have been especially acute along its coasts, in its major cities, across the industrial Midwest, and in New York City.
The devastation, in other words, has been disproportionately felt in blue America, which helps explain why people on opposing sides of a partisan divide that has intensified in the past two decades are thinking about the virus differently. It is not just that Democrats and Republicans disagree on how to reopen businesses, schools and the country as a whole. Beyond perception, beyond ideology,
In the interest of fighting over just about any conceivable thing, even during a national pandemic, Americans are now arguing about the right to assemble together for religious services.
You need not be a religious zealot to recall something about religious freedom in the First Amendment, just the 10th word, in fact
For the past 18 months we have seen a concerted effort to vilify the Trump administration for declaring a national emergency on the southern border and all the actions that have been taken in support of that declaration. The left continues to talk about “cages” and “family separation.”
They say that all these actions were mean-spirited, racist, and xenophobic. They say it was inhumane and there was no reason to do it, so it must be about hatred toward immigrants. It has been their battle cry to demonize President Trump, the Border Patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The President was perfectly accurate, and for once insusceptible to questions about his good faith, when he expressed surprise at Attorney General Barr’s comment last week that former president Obama and former vice president Biden, “based on the information that I have,” would not become subjects of a criminal investigation, “whatever their level of involvement” revealed in the examination by special counsel John Durham of the origins of the spurious Trump-Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.
The attorney general elaborated that he did not wish to continue or aggravate the mixing of politics with the law and suggested that the best method of adjudicating Mr. Biden’s role
The Monterey County District Attorney’s office has launched an investigation into whether Tara Reade lied on the witness stand while acting as an expert witness.
Reade, under the name Alexandra McCabe, for years testified as an expert in domestic violence cases for the California D.A.’s office. Among the issues is whether she lied about her credentials to qualify as an expert.
“We are investigating whether Ms. McCabe gave false testimony under oath,” Monterey County chief assistant district attorney Berkley Brannon told POLITICO Tuesday.
Brannon said the office does not yet know how many cases in which Reade testified as an expert.
Illinois Democrats passed a state budget over the weekend that relies on billions in still-not-guaranteed federal dollars to avoid a gaping deficit.
The state's 2021 budget, now headed to Gov. J. B. Pritzker's (D.) desk, is written with the expectation that the $3.5 billion the state received under the CARES Act will be freed up for general spending. That would require Congress to change limitations on those funds, which currently can only be spent on expenses directly related to coronavirus—not general fiscal costs.
The bill also gives Pritzker the authority to borrow up to $5 billion from the Federal Reserve as part of a program backstopped by Congress.
President Donald Trump is preparing to exit his second arms-control treaty with Russia since taking the oath of office, and the opposition is already in high dudgeon. "This is insane," tweeted former CIA director Michael Hayden. "Another shortsighted Trump move to abandon a treaty that includes many close allies," tweeted Samantha Power, former ambassador to the United Nations.
But Trump's decision is the right one — both in the details and on principle. The deal in question is the Open Skies treaty, signed in 1992, which allows U.S. and Russian spy planes to fly over military installations and weapons facilities.
Richard Grenell Bends Sen. Mark Warner Over His
Knee One More Time Before Heading Out the Door replies
Knee One More Time Before Heading Out the Door replies
Richard Grenell is out as acting DNI, with the newly appointed John Ratcliffe taking over the job today. Some have speculated that Ratcliffe, who was savagely opposed his first time around, was quickly put in place this time because of how effective Grenell has been. I’d say that’s a good bet, as he’s gotten more done in three months than the previous DNI got done in three years.
One of the things he’s gotten done is finally start declassifying long held documents which show corruption by the Obama administration. We’ve seen the revelations involving Michael Flynn, and that appears to just be the tip of the iceberg.
Even if Leftists successfully obliterate Tara Reade’s story, there’s one creepy Joe Biden narrative that’s not going to go away, and that’s the endless footage of him getting too close to and too touchy with little girls. On Tuesday, a new video emerged with the usual footage showing Biden relentlessly pawing manifestly uncomfortable little girls. What makes this one different is the way it’s paired with statements from Professor Anthony Zenkus (ironically enough, a die-hard leftist and anti-capitalist) who speaks in an old video about how pedophiles groom children:
This story in Politico will add fuel to the fire to the GOP argument that Democrats are rooting against signs of an economic recovery before November. Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, contends that “we are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country.” As the country gradually figures out how to function with the coronavirus, the sudden steep drop in economic activity will climb back up again.
In fact, it may be happening already, although it may not show up in economic statistics for a while.
If you’ve ever smugly pulled out your cellphone to record a confrontation with a stranger, hoping to publicly humiliate that person and even destroy their life, you’re probably a Karen of the worst ilk. Likewise, if approached by an insufferable busybody who lives to scold people minding their own business, and your first reaction is to call the police, you’re also a Karen. Manhattan is filled with Karens, the meme that once referred to the ‘can I speak to the manager’ lady with stacked hair and chunky highlights that evolved into a way to call out any very annoying person who loves rules and tattling.
Five senators are staring down serious political danger ahead of the November elections.
With less than six months to go until Election Day, the battle for control of the Senate hinges on five key states. Democrats are after four seats in particular — in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and North Carolina — while Republicans are largely playing defense, but see an easy pickup opportunity in Alabama.
A handful of seats in states like Iowa, Montana and Michigan are also showing signs they may be in play.
Here are the Senate seats most likely to flip in 2020.
There have been several great columns on the debate over mask-wearing in public. Scott McKay at American Spectator explains why the mask is essentially useless: The mask is not an adequate defense against the COVID-19 virus, gang. (snip) David Marcus astutely observes that the mask has become the political symbol of 2020. Indeed it has. In Staten Island a mob of “karens” forced a woman from a store for not wearing a mask and they were not at all polite about it; they were vicious. This is all the end result of the wholly unnecessary lockdown of the American economy
The Late Unpleasantness
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Damned perfidious Yankee scoundrels! Readers will please excuse my strong language, and those of my countrymen residing north of the Mason-Dixon Line should not feel that their integrity is being impugned, because I speak specifically of the New York Times. It has long been my conviction that no honest person would ever wish their name to be associated with that disreputable publication, but over the weekend, the Times went far beyond their usual “fake news” with an unseemly attack on the United States armed forces. “Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?” was the headline on a disgusting 1,800-word column, signed by the editorial board
As states across the country begin the process of reopening, Americans continue to battle over the methods governors and local authorities have used to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
Unfortunately, many states and localities have set up arbitrary and, in many cases, absurd rules that do little more than aggravate citizens and almost nothing to stop the spread of the virus.
For instance, some Americans have been pulled over and ticketed for merely driving, hardly an activity that is likely to spread disease.
One Pennsylvania woman received a $200 ticket for violating Gov. Tom Wolf’s statewide stay-at-home order when she said she had merely gone on a drive to relieve her quarantine restlessness,
COVID-19 has already killed thousands of nursing home residents in New York. An estimated 10,000 or more, double what the state reports. It’s hard to know what’s worse, the dying or the lying.
Under criticism for forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is trying to shift the blame to President Trump. “Don’t criticize the state for following the president’s policy,” Cuomo said at his Saturday news conference. The governor points to a Trump administration statement issued on March 13.
Sorry, Governor, but you’re twisting what the statement said. The administration recommended nursing homes should admit patients even if they were coming from a hospital battling COVID-19,
Twitter's "Head of Site Integrity" Yoel Roth boasts on his LinkedIn that he is in charge of "developing and enforcing Twitter’s rules," like the one that led Twitter to slap a new warning label on two of President Trump's tweets concerning mail-in balloting on Tuesday -- posts that Twitter conspicuously deemed "misleading," even though bipartisan panels of experts have agreed with the president that absentee balloting increases the risk of voter fraud.
However, Roth's own barrage of anti-Trump, politically charged tweets seemingly calls into question whether he should be creating rules for the president and other Twitter users, especially when Twitter is under fire for its alleged left-wing bias.
A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless that horse resides on the Pritzer horse farm in Wisconsin As he requests the power to seize private business property if owners open too early or not in concert with his wishes, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker says it’s not safe yet to hold indoor church services, but it’s totally okay that construction workers travel to his Wisconsin horse farm to build his new house.
Twitter applied a fact check to President Donald Trump on Tuesday because he claimed that voter fraud was more likely under the Democrats’ proposed nationwide vote-by-mail system — something even Democrats once believed. (Tweets) Yet Twitter does not apply the same standard to inaccurate or speculative statements by Democrats. Case in point: the “very fine people” hoax, claiming Trump praised neo-Nazis who rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.As Breitbart News has demonstrated extensively, Trump never praised the neo-Nazis, but in fact said they should be “condemned totally”
Stocks soared Tuesday as enthusiasm builds about the reopening of the country and the development of a coronavirus vaccine.The S&P 500 rose nearly 2%, breaking over 3,000 for the first time since March 5. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose over 2%, briefly trading above 25,000 for the first time since early March, CNN reported.Some companies showing the greatest gains would be aided by faster removal of business and travel restrictions. They include Carnival, whose shares jumped 12.7%, MGM Resorts, whose shares climbed 8.6%, and United Airlines and Southwest Airlines, whose shares rose over 11% each.