"are we prepared to call what Beijing did by its real name and make our enemy pay the requisite price?"

Sebastian Gorka writes in part in American Greatness,

...And whether or not the original Wuhan virus was engineered and deliberately released, or spread as the result of accidental contamination of a lab worker is irrelevant. China must be judged according to what it did after the release: by restricting domestic travel but allowing international travel from Wuhan to the rest of the world, Beijing satisfied the key elements of any reasonable definition of terrorism.

No, the Communist government is not a sub-state actor using violence to realize its self-determination, or some organization with a religiously defined apocalyptic end-state it wishes to realize through its attacks on innocents. But by allowing Chinese citizens to seed the world with a deadly virus that has taken more American lives in just four months than all the years of the Vietnam War, Xi Jinping’s government has deliberately targeted civilians for death.

America has to get back to work now. Never before has so much damage been done to our citizens and our national economy in such a short period of time. Now the question is, are we prepared to call what Beijing did by its real name and make our enemy pay the requisite price?

Read more here.

Not one single question about Tara Reade!

David Rutz and Brent Scher report in part in the Free Beacon,

Joe Biden has now done 19 interviews spanning nearly 4 hours in the 5 weeks since March 24, the day a former staffer in his U.S. Senate office came forward to accuse him of sexual assault. None of the 142 questions asked by his interviewers have been on the allegations.

Biden, from a studio in the basement of his Delaware home, has been interviewed by reporters from major networks including CNN and MSNBC, as well as local stations across the country since Tara Reade's allegation was reported by the Intercept in March. Biden has still not publicly commented on the accusation from Reade, who says the then-senator pinned her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers in 1993 when she was a staff assistant in his office.

In the past two weeks alone, Biden has sat for at least an additional 97 minutes and 16 seconds of taped interviews, according to a Free Beacon analysis. The sexual assault allegation never came up. MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski asked Biden what he thought about President Donald Trump's daily briefings. CBS comedian James Corden asked him to play "show and tell" with something from his Delaware home. CBS4's Jim DeFede asked if the coronavirus made the case for a $15 minimum wage. KDKA's Jon DeLano asked what he thought of when he thinks of Pittsburgh and whether he'd like Michelle Obama as his running mate.

The Biden campaign did not respond to an emailed interview request.

Read more here.

"Committing the heinous crime of going outside"

From the Babylon Bee:

SACRAMENTO, CA—Governor Gavin Newsom has instructed detention facilities across California to begin releasing violent felons to make room for skateboarders, surfers, and other people who have committed the heinous crime of going outside.

Thousands of cells have now been freed up for "the dregs of society," as Newsom referred to people who go to the beach or skate at a skate park. As the felons left the prisons, they laughed at the skaters and surfers entering their previous cells. The skater bros just said, "Dude, not cool" and the surfers said, "Totes not stoked bra, major kook move dude."

"We need to free up those prison cells for the really dangerous people, like beachgoers," said Governor Gavin Newsom at a press conference. "We can't have those dangerous people who sit on the beach for a few hours or do doozy flipkicks and 630 spinaroos out on our streets."

The felons went out and immediately committed crimes, but many were undocumented immigrants and so were given a stimulus check instead of getting arrested.

Multiple brief intensive workouts

Gretchen Reynolds reports in the New York Times,

...When you find yourself sitting for most of the day, try to rise frequently and move, preferably intensely, as often during the day as possible and for as many seconds as you can manage.

Read more here.

"Pushing airlines further and further into a deep hole!"

Michigan lawmakers deny Gov. Whitmer's request to keep the state under lockdown.

Beginning this morning under a steady rainfall, hundreds of protestors, many of whom were armed, gathered at Michigan's capitol building to protest Governor Whitmer's edict to keep the state in lockdown. Valerie Edwards has a biased report supportive of the Governor here.

Images showed hundreds of protesters descending on the Capitol for the 'American Patriot Rally' that was organized by Michigan United for Liberty while the Michigan House decided whether to extend Whitmer's state of emergency for 28 more days.

Ultimately, the lawmakers denied Whitmer's request and passed a resolution authorizing the Speaker of the House to commence legal action, challenging the governor's authority and actions during the pandemic. Whitmer is unable to veto the resolution.

Lots of photos here.

"White coat supremacy"

Lloyd Billingsly writes in FrontPage Magazine,

Shortly before the 1964 election, Fact magazine asked psychiatrists if Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit for the presidency. More than 2,000 psychiatrists responded, even though they had not examined the candidate. Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. As the 2020 election approaches, the whitecoats ramp up a virulent hatred for President Trump and the people who support him.

This surge is a belch from Soviet psychiatry and an echo of what the Chinese Communists are doing now. If American shrinks are so skewed on politics, the deplorables might wonder, why listen to them on anything else? The profession does owe a great deal to a Viennese coke head, but there’s more to it.

“Sadly, psychiatry has a capacity for abuse that’s basically built in,” Stella Morabito explains. “According to the late psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, the whole field is so susceptible to being used as a means of social control that it does people far more harm than good.”

Read more here.

"religious fervor eclipsing rational thinking"

Keith Sanders writes in part in the American Spectator,

...The problem with religious fervor eclipsing rational thinking, even when the fervor ostensibly arose from scientific analysis, is that the momentum of supernatural terror, once instilled in a population, will outlast any rational application and cause devastating consequences. We see this in the way that lockdowns have outlasted their original intent of “flattening the curve,” and even persisted for more than a month in areas that had little or no curve to begin with, resulting in unprecedented mass unemployment and destruction of prosperity.

...They are the actions of frightened people attempting to appease something they cannot see and do not understand, using tactics they have been taught — and seem to have largely misunderstood — by an ordained elite who are themselves proven more wrong by the day in their original assessments of this invisible threat and the appropriate responses to it. All the while the visible fruits of our until recently liberal society and formerly explosive economy are sacrificed and burned, the smoke drifting up to the stratosphere in hope of appeasing our new and terrible gods. And like so much fruit and treasure burned in sacrifice by our superstitious ancestors, the smoke just drifts and dissipates, while the treasure is gone forever.

Read more here.

"This coup against the Constitution" "Are we a nation of sheep, or only asleep?"

Stephen Balch writes in part in American Greatness,

...The scientific “experts” come off even worse than the politicians, pontificating grandly from half-baked models and inadequate data, myopic about everything outside their purviews and not particularly wise even there, more dispensers of fright than information. Modern civilization requires the scientific mind, but its limits, arrogance, and overreach have never been so grotesquely on parade.

Hysteria: America has become a place of recurrent panics and manias, though none till now sufficient to implode it. Some have been launched “to get” Trump—Russia collusion, the Kavanaugh furor, and the “Ukrainegate” impeachment. But quite besides these, nonstop existential alarms also have been sounding over climate change, “Me-Too,” transgender discrimination, pervasive racism, sexism, etc. Our public squares are now lynching grounds for Twitter mobs. Habituation has made us a nation exquisitely easy to spook.

...This coup against the Constitution, though largely the work of minor-league pols, has nonetheless been revolutionary in sweep, purging owners from their businesses and workers from their trades.

Our loyal opposition and its media confreres have treated COVID-19 as a political opportunity and weapon, holding emergency measures hostage to their ideological wishlists. Worse yet, America’s political and cultural establishment is using the crisis as its last pre-election chance to bring anti-Trump hostility to a boil, relentlessly attacking the president for whatever he does or doesn’t. Exhibiting shades of Russia’s 19th-century radical intelligentsia—history’s most consequential class of sociopaths—their motto seems to be “the worse the better.”

A nation of sheep, or only asleep: Is the citizenry’s docile response to these unprecedented abrogations simply the quiet preceding a storm? Of all the questions raised by the “great reveal” the answer to this one is the least certain and the most important.

There are growing rumblings of mutiny, but on the whole, acquiescence reigns supreme. This is to be expected perhaps from authority-addicted Europeans, but not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. In describing these days will future historians employ as metaphor a pressure cooker about to explode or sheep being led to slaughter? The jury is still out.

Read more here.

Exposing DC's biggest secret!

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,

With congress saying they will not be returning to work next week, it appears Kentucky representative Thomas Massie has decided to use the opportunity to expose Washington DC’s biggest secret. Something 99% of American voters do not understand:



Oh dear, he’s telling secrets. You see, congress doesn’t actually write legislation. The last item of legislation written by congress was sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to K-Street. Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells the laws; lobbyists then pay congress commissions for passing their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC.

Go here to read Sundance's fascinating explanation of how things work in Washington DC in 2020.

"They want unquestioned obedience!"

"Dissent of any kind is no longer tolerated in this country! Fact-based honesty is under attack, even in hospitals! Informed debate is exactly what the authorities don't want. They want unquestioned obedience. The only justification for YouTube taking down the video is that the two doctors had reached different conclusions than the people in charge! Censorship is not about science. It is about power! Our media are no longer challenging power. They are colluding with power!"

There is much more, including Dave Rubin. Tucker just gets better and better as the video goes on.

Financing fake news projects

In FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield reports in part,

When the Alliance Defending Freedom helped a local church sue Chattanooga for banning its drive-in prayer service, the article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center's smear of the religious civil rights organization as a hate group. But the reporter who wrote the article was no ordinary employee. Wyatt Massey was one of the 225 members of Report for America's 'corps' who are planted in local newsrooms to promote the radical agendas of the left-wing group.

...Facebook has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.

Most newspapers are happy with the arrangement: it’s the readers who are cheated.

Facebook has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead, it’s funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism, it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.

This isn’t philanthropy, it’s politics.

Not only is Facebook financing a political agenda, but its funding of RFA also represents an even deeper conflict of interest when the embedded activists from the left-wing group start functioning as fact-checkers. The social media monopoly has used media fact-checkers in an on and off way to censor conservatives.

Read more here.

"We'll just have to see what happens!"

Christopher Roach writes in part in American Greatness,

These shutdowns have been economically devastating. They’re psychologically taxing, hard on relationships, and damaging to our communities. And they’re encouraging the worst instincts among the ruling class and its servants.

Public policy, medicine, and life all involve risk assessments and changing course based on new evidence. After two months of shutdowns, it looks like we’ve killed our economy to forestall a phantom threat.

If this were actually a situation where millions of deaths were the alternative, continuing the lockdowns would be defensible. They’re even forgivable considering the state of our knowledge a couple of months ago. But with the benefit of the last two months of experience, it is clear that the toll of coronavirus has been and will be much closer to a bad flu season than millions of deaths.

One can expect the media, no matter what happens in Georgia, to report on every public gathering as ominous, to exaggerate the spread of the disease, and to shame the people of Georgia for their foolhardiness. As with hydroxychloroquine, the factual question of whether or not this is an acceptable risk will be subordinated to the social identity of rejecting every word out of Trump’s mouth, no matter how reasonable.

Reopening may, of course, prove to be a deadly and costly mistake. This is a new virus, after all, and its impact is not entirely known, treatment protocols are haphazard, and Georgia’s decision to “reopen” is being made under conditions of uncertainty, though not as much uncertainty as the original decision to close. Real science looks to evidence, not ghost stories about what could happen.

As both the scientific method and President Trump like to say, “we’ll just have to see what happens.”

Read more here.

DeBlasio threatens Jews

Ryan Saavedra reports in the Daily Wire,

New York City Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio faced an instant and widespread backlash late on Monday night over a tweet that singled out the “Jewish community” in threatening arrests for not following social distancing guidelines.

De Blasio tweeted: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) responded: “Would DeBlasio have sent this identical tweet with the word ‘Jewish’ replaced by any other religious minority? If not, why not? Laws should be enforced neutrally w/o targeting religious faith. #ProtectFreeExercise.”

Read much more here.

They like their Governor!

Hank Berrien in the Daily Wire brings us a powerful story about the citizens of South Dakota throwing a surprise parade for Governor Kristi Noem, who had refused to implement "stay at home" orders. She obviously did not know about the parade ahead of time as this video shows.

I am so blessed to serve the people of the great State of South Dakota. You folks made my day! pic.twitter.com/oy0e5KO9RZ

— Governor Kristi Noem (@govkristinoem) April 28, 2020

I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, not far from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and this video makes me proud of my heritage!

"we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:"

In American Greatness, Dennis Prager writes in part,

“Police state” does not mean totalitarian state. America is not a totalitarian state; we still have many freedoms. In a totalitarian state, this article could not be legally published, and if it were illegally published, I would be imprisoned and/or executed. But we are presently living with all four of the key hallmarks of a police state:

No. 1: Draconian laws depriving citizens of elementary civil rights.

The federal, state, county and city governments are now restricting almost every freedom except those of travel and speech. Americans have been banned from going to work (and thereby earning a living), meeting in groups (both indoors and outdoors), meeting in their cars in church parking lots to pray and entering state-owned properties such as beaches and parks—among many other prohibitions.

No. 2: A mass media supportive of the state’s messaging and deprivation of rights.

The New York Times, CNN and every other mainstream mass medium—except Fox News, The Wall Street Journal (editorial and opinion pages only) and talk radio—have served the cause of state control over individual Americans’ lives just as Pravda served the Soviet government. In fact, there is almost no more dissent in The New York Times than there was in Pravda. And the Big Tech platforms are removing posts about the virus and potential treatments they deem “misinformation.”

No. 3: Use of police.

Police departments throughout America have agreed to enforce these laws and edicts with what can only be described as frightening alacrity. After hearing me describe police giving summonses to, or even arresting, people for playing baseball with their children on a beach, jogging alone without a mask, or worshipping on Easter while sitting isolated in their cars in a church parking lot, a police officer called my show. He explained that the police have no choice. They must respond to every dispatch they receive.

“And why are they dispatched to a person jogging on a beach or sitting alone in a park?” I asked.

Because the department was informed about these lawbreakers.

“And who told the police about these lawbreakers?” I asked.

His answer brings us to the fourth characteristic of a police state:

No. 4: Snitches.

The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, set up a “snitch line,” whereby New Yorkers were told to send authorities photos of fellow New Yorkers violating any of the quarantine laws. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti similarly encouraged snitching, unabashedly using the term.

If you love liberty, you must see that it is jeopardized more than at any time since America’s founding. And that means, among other things, that at this time, a vote for any Democrat is a vote to end liberty.

Read more here.

Are we?

From the Babylon Bee:

MALIBU, CA—Many described the scene as breathtaking or awe-inspiring. Others were so touched they couldn't find the words to communicate how they felt. Most simply wept.

No matter how they expressed their emotions, everyone agreed that the scene off the Malibu coast Monday morning was exactly what America needed to get through this pandemic. Celebrities gathered their multi-million-dollar yachts on the waters of the Pacific Ocean and spelled out "WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER."

"We're just like you," said Ellen DeGeneres on her Instagram as her servants sailed her yacht into position to form the apostrophe. "Yes, maybe I have a yacht and you've only ever been on the Storybook Canal boats at Disneyland, but still. It's pretty much the same thing."

"Stay home, save lives -- it's not that hard," said Patton Oswalt, whose fleet of yachts made up several of the letters. "Look, poor people, it's not worth risking your life just to go to Fuddruckers or work a job or whatever it is you peasants do all day."

After the stunt was over, Oswalt had his chauffeur drive him home in his hot tub limousine as he snorted several million dollars' worth of powdered caviar.

"All of humanity is fighting this together and we're all as one," said Lady Gaga, who was wearing a bathing suit made out of gold bricks. "Though, I mean, don't try to get on my yacht. My guards will literally shoot you. That's not a metaphor."

Power and beauty

via Misanthropic Humanitarian

"unctuous asseverations"

Conrad Black writes in part in American Greatness,

...The national Democratic leadership locked arms and deployed their media acolytes in support of a prolonged shutdown where virtually everyone in the country would be tested and those who test positively identify everyone they have been in contact with in the last two weeks and those people are chased down and the hunt for the last bacillus of coronavirus is pursued throughout the country to every attic, basement, homeless shelter, and rustic cabin. The president, under this scenario, would, in the greater national and human interest, commit political suicide like a kamikaze in a good cause, and patiently explain to the next scores of millions of Americans thrown out of work by the Pelosi-Biden-Schumer counter-virus strategy, that their sacrifice is noble and inevitable.

What a godsend the coronavirus crisis was supposed to be to a political party that struck out corrupting the upper ranks of the Justice Department and the intelligence services with a fraudulent narrative about illegal election-rigging with Russia, and struck out again with a fatuous presidential impeachment for unimpeachable acts with no serious evidence that the president committed the accused acts anyway.

...The NeverTrumpers have fallen in with this nonsense, more subtly, by calling for putting “safe ahead of soon.” This is all piffle and the Democrats have turned the heat on under the frying pan and then jumped into it.

Despite all the unctuous asseverations that nothing will be the same again and that this is a human crisis that must unite the country, it is mainly political and rather tawdry politics at that. The anti-Trump media whipped up a state of frenzy and panic with no real evidence of the medical danger, initially to set the president up for responding inadequately. When he instead responded very effectively, they shifted course and without commending him on the lockdown, said that because he hadn’t developed testing capabilities quickly enough, the lockdown must be long enough to give the Democrats a chance of winning the election. (An economic depression on the scale of some plague from the Old Testament is all that could put Joe Biden into the White House.)

...Every death is a sadness, but this is not a demographic threat or a public health assault that justifies pushing up to 1 million people a day into unemployment and the loss of trillions of dollars of value on the stock exchanges. It has been a severe crisis, but most of its severity has been the consequence of the panic generated by the irresponsible media, who thought they might destroy the Trump presidency at last.

They have failed again, and this is not such a watershed moment. In a few months, everything will be largely back to what it was within the United States. The big changes will be geopolitical: the mystique of the inexorable rise of China will be very faded, and the remaining credibility of the concept of the European Union will be in tatters.

Trump wins the political chess game at home in a clean sweep: the medical crisis, the financial rescue, the rebound of the economy, and at the voting places of the nation. And he will be the winner in the world. China and Europe have long been billed as rivals to the United States as the world’s most powerful government and population. We will hear less of that.

Read more here.

"Joe Biden's insurance company just canceled his policy for that!"

Can anyone tell me the name of these trees?

I hear you, Hillary. I'm just resting up for a big endorsement.

Ace of Spades has a sixteen-second video of Joe Biden falling asleep during Hillary Clinton's endorsement of him today.

The new state religion

Buck Throckmorton writes in the Ace of Spades blog,

American Sharia - The Church Of The Wuhan Flu
[Buck Throckmorton]
—Open Blogger
After years of fighting the left’s attempt to impose The Sustainable Organic Church Of The Carbon Apocalypse as America’s official state religion, I really didn’t expect an upstart religion to go from zero to Sharia in just two months, but here we are. How’s everyone enjoying the mandatory religious codes under our new state religion that just showed up from Wuhan?

Social distancing went from “keep a safe distance” to “remain behind closed doors at all times” in about the same time that Fat Tuesday gives way to Lent. And this sure is feeling like Lent in that you must sacrifice pleasures to be an obedient adherent. But unlike Christianity’s Lenten season, where there is no police force nor elected official commanding you to be properly observant, our new state religion will not tolerate anyone being deficiently pious.

There are many parallels that can be drawn between the required Covid observances and traditional religious practices, but the two that stand out the most are Masks and Shutter-At-Home.

Masks = Veils. Don’t misunderstand, if I’m in a fairly crowded store I’ll wear a mask (at least for now) to assure frightened co-shoppers that I’m not going to spread germs on them. And if I were on a plane or in a nursing home, I would certainly wear one just in case I’m an asymptomatic carrier. But the zealotry over masking is long past any health or safety concern. It’s become a public showing of obedience to the rules handed down by our ruling clerisy. A person riding his bike, alone, without wearing a mask is at risk of a public shaming from way too many Americans right now. He is not posing a risk to anyone, but neither is he publicly displaying obedience to the faith. And that will not be tolerated these days.

Shutter At Home = Observing The Sabbath. The high priests of our new religion are ordering police to arrest lone surfers, or dads playing catch with their kids at a park, or couples launching a canoe, etc. Their motivation has nothing to do with preventing the spread of disease. Zero. It is about regulating unapproved pleasure-seeking during a time when piety behind closed doors has been decreed mandatory. If you’re not miserable and pent up behind locked doors, you are a sinner.

And then there are the Church Ladies of our new state religion - the whole Karen meme is about these suddenly empowered secular Church Ladies who live for moments like this. Normally their only joy in life is scolding people for simple sins such as not using canvas grocery bags or perhaps driving a large SUV. Now these humorless vigilantes feel they are deputized to enforce the observance of the shutter-at-home sabbath. A sabbath that goes on day after day, week after week, without any end in sight. Karen could not be happier. It is a near certainty that lockdown-induced chastity being imposed on millions of people is a thought that warms the icy heart of these charmless people. (And yes, there are male Church Ladies. We most commonly refer to them as “journalists")

So go out and live in a manner that that is safe and makes you feel comfortable. But above all else – enjoy life. Publicly and proudly.

"A tipping point? Breaking through partisan blinders? Very loud silence!"

"A tragedy, a failure, and a disgrace."

In American Greatness, Julie Kelly writes in part,

After failing to prepare his state and the nation’s largest city adequately for the expected outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive in late March ordering nursing home operators to readmit hospitalized residents.

“During this global health emergency, all NHs [nursing homes] must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals,” the state’s department of health directed in a memo dated March 25. “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission” (emphasis added).

For weeks, the crisis at New York nursing homes rapidly unfolded but pleas for help fell on deaf ears in Albany. The New York Post reported last week that an executive for a Brooklyn facility overrun with sick residents begged the Health Department to allow him to send suspected COVID-19 residents to the empty U.S. naval ship docked outside of the city.

“We don’t have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients,” Donny Tuckman, chief executive officer for Cobble Health Center, wrote on April 9. At least 55 people have died at Tuckman’s facility as state officials failed to respond.

Nursing homes in Queens and the Bronx have suffered similar horror stories. The Post reports that about 3,500 nursing home residents in New York have succumbed to the disease, roughly one-quarter of the state’s total fatalities, a trendline that mirrors the nation’s overall results.

But Cuomo, enjoying sky-high approval ratings despite his incompetence, which has resulted in his state representing about 32 percent of the nation’s death toll, refuses to accept blame for the tragedy at his state’s nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

...But rather than investigate the reckless public officials who provided the deadly guidance in the first place or offer extra assistance to the distressed system, Cuomo ordered an investigation into beleaguered nursing homes for failing to comply with state regulations.

...What’s even more heartbreaking about the systematic failure to protect nursing homes is knowing that so many died before seeing a loved one as family members are kept away both from COVID-19 patients and noninfected residents. It is a heartless, cruel fate and undoubtedly it will wreak long-lasting emotional damage on family and friends left behind.

This is a national tragedy on many levels and an inexcusable, avoidable one at that.

Rather than focus on how to safeguard the most vulnerable among us, politicians have been preening for cable news cameras, blaming the president, halting the sale of vegetable seeds, and warning against small dinner parties in private homes. A tragedy, a failure, and a disgrace.

Read more here.

"the brutally delicate balancing act that Trump is engaged in."

In the American Thinker, Bill Dunne wonders if Trump erred in criticizing Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for reopening the state too soon. Count me as one who was disappointed with Trump's decision to criticize Kemp. I also spent time reading the comments, and learned about Georgia and DC politics. One commenter who calls himself perplexed lawyer wrote,

You’re absolutely right I think that the Kemp comments will not lose Trump the election, but I think his harshness was undeserved and unfair. Smelled personal and our country can not afford such indulgences. It is also inconsistent with his (Trump’s) message and momentum to reopen. He should have wished Kemp and Georgians the best and indicated we would carefully watch their progress with hope and concern. Not his finest moment and I wish he had done better.

Read the whole thing here.

"power over the People"

Co-blogger CBD writes in the Ace of Spades blog,

Is progressivism the political philosophy of misplaced priorities? Obviously, it is also the purview of the masturbatory fantasies of every budding dictator, who giggles with glee at the prospect of sending the jack-booted thugs of the state to enforce increasingly ridiculous edicts, all in service of their ultimate goal...power over the People. Examine most of the grand schemes of the Leftover the past three generations and one will discover some spectacularly misdirected efforts. Gun control leaps to mind, where the thousands of byzantine laws are directed not at the miscreants who would misuse weapons, but at the law-abiding citizens who are exercising their God-given, natural rights to self-defense and protection against those despots who would steal their rights!

Fast forward from 1968 to 2020, and the same tired stupidity reigns supreme. Instead of protecting those who are most at risk from Sino-Lung-Rot, the elites, in their imagined infinite wisdom decided to focus their fascistic power grab on those who are least threatened by it, and leave to their own devices the most vulnerable among us.

Blue State Governors Lied, Thousands of Nursing Home Residents Died
Over 7,000 of the country’s coronavirus deaths emerged out of nursing homes.
Of the 4,377 coronavirus deaths in New Jersey, over 1,700 died due to infections in nursing homes. That nearly 40% of coronavirus deaths in one of the hardest hit states took place in nursing homes casts a stark light on the misplaced priorities of blue states battling the pandemic by locking down houses of worship and small businesses, while putting few to no resources into protecting nursing home residents.

Lest you think that nothing much can be done, I have first-hand experience with a facility that was proactive and took Kung Flu seriously. But they have the resources to deal with it effectively, going beyond the state mandates. And those mandates are scattershot and chaotic. So State Troopers patrol the parking lots of state parks, and arrest peaceful protesters. State administrators write arcane and insane rules governing face masks to be used by the healthy, while our most vulnerable and most in need of finite government resources die in their beds in understaffed nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Meanwhile our hospitals are furloughing employees because the expected (by the elites) tsunami of Commie-Flu cases never appeared, but they were told to cancel everything else, including cancer surgeries and cardiovascular procedures!

Yes...they worship at the altar of power, but they also focus their attentions on exactly the wrong things. It is a toxic combination of arrogance, power and stupidity, and it has come close to destroying us.

At least their philosophical antecedents could do a few things well...Mussolini was famous for getting the trains to run on time. The current crop of authoritarians can't balance a checkbook or manage to keep the streets clean.

And they want to run healthcare in America? Our experience of the last few months should be the final nail in the coffin of single-payer, government-run medicine in America.

But it won't be...

A captor, a captive, and a hostage rescuer

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reminds us,

The world presents North Korea as a rogue regime without noticing/admitting that in reality, North Korea is a proxy province of China.

Chairman Xi is the captor.

Chairman Kim is the captive.

President Trump is the hostage rescuer…. and so they dance.

POTUS knows the status of Kim; both Kim and Trump have discussed the dynamic. Chairman Xi doesn’t like the Kim and Trump relationship; because it has disrupted the entire purpose of the DPRK as a proxy province providing Beijing plausible deniability.

Read more here.

Glenn Reynolds: "I’d just be happy if social media companies weren’t complete tools of politicized lefty “activists.”

Glenn Reynolds links to a Wall Street Journal article by Josh Disbrow. Glenn points out, THE MAIN RULE OF JOURNALISM IS THAT TRUMP IS NEVER ALLOWED TO BE RIGHT. The Journal headline for the story: An Experimental Ultraviolet Light Treatment for Covid-19 Takes Political Heat: Trump’s musings prompt social-media censorship of information about an experimental treatment.

Josh writes,

I ran an obscure pharmaceutical company until a few days ago. Then we got famous. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Aytu BioScience made a commitment to find ways to help. One of those ways came through our newly formed relationship with a prominent Los Angeles hospital.

On April 20 we put out a press release titled “Aytu BioScience Signs Exclusive Global License with Cedars-Sinai for Potential Coronavirus Treatment.” The treatment is called Healight, and it was developed by research physicians at the hospital’s Medically Associated Science and Technology Program. The technology, which has been in development since 2016, uses ultraviolet light as an antimicrobial and is a promising potential treatment for Covid-19.

Aytu and Cedars-Sinai have engaged with the Food and Drug Administration to pursue a rapid path to human use through an Emergency Use Authorization. But hardly anyone noticed—until Thursday, when President Trump mused, “. . . supposing you brought the light inside the body . . .”

My team and I knew the president’s comments could trigger a backlash against the idea of UV light as a treatment, which might hinder our ability to get the word out. We decided to create a YouTube account, upload a video animation we had created, and tweet it out. It received some 50,000 views in 24 hours.

Then YouTube took it down. So did Vimeo. Twitter suspended our account. The narrative changed from whether UV light can be used to treat Covid-19 to “Aytu is being censored.”

These days, politics seems to dictate that if one party says, “The sky is blue,” the other party is obligated to reply, “No, it’s not, and you’re a terrible human being for thinking that.” That leaves no room for science, in which the data speak for themselves, regardless of ideology, and only when they’re ready. Unfortunately, the visceral excitement of political conflict draws far more clicks and better ratings than the methodical world of science.

Technologies like Healight, which if borne out through clinical studies may represent a viable way to kill coronaviruses, aren’t provided the clear-headed consideration they deserve but are instead flushed into the political mosh-pit of “us vs. them.”

Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo are under enormous pressure from political activists. They also need to ensure that information on their platforms is safe and accurate. That’s exactly why Aytu decided to post videos and tweet about Healight.

We at Aytu BioScience are confident that treatments for Covid-19 will be found. We hope we can help. But above all, we hope science will ultimately speak louder than politics.

Glenn Reynolds adds, Hope indeed. I’d just be happy if social media companies weren’t complete tools of politicized lefty “activists.”

The direct-to-worker approach

In the Daily Caller, James Pinkerton likes the ideas of Missouri Senator Josh Hawley with regard to getting the economy going again.

Less than a year and a half into his freshman term, Sen. Josh Hawley has been best known for his bold stance against the hegemony of Silicon Valley.

Indeed, Hawley, by defending the family, as well as ordered conservatism, against the continuous gale of digital intrusion, has earned the enmity of many libertarians. For instance, Tech Liberation has slammed his efforts as “elitist and highly paternalistic.”

Hawley has taken up another cause, defending the incomes of American workers in the face of the coronavirus threat — and once again, libertarians are up in arms. For instance, one columnist at The Washington Examiner declared that Hawley has gone “literally full socialist.” And the Koch Brothers-ish FreedomWorks jibed, “The Missouri Republican has repeatedly attempted to cast aside the @GOP’s commitment to limit government.” (RELATED: Hawley Hits Small Business Administration For Saying Religious Orgs Are Not Eligible For Coronavirus Aid)

On the other hand, Hawley has gained some high-level fans, who can hardly be called liberals, let alone socialists. One such is Arthur Laffer, the dean of supply-side economics. That was the tax-rate-cutting thinking — summed up in the Laffer Curve — that Ronald Reagan used to lift America out of the stagflation of the 1970s, making America great again in the 1980s.

As an aside, the author of this piece, who worked as a junior domestic policy aide in the Reagan White House, well recalls that the Gipper’s innovative policy ideas were, at that time, often derided by fellow Republicans. Back then, one top GOPer called Reagan’s plan a “riverboat gamble”; another called it “voodoo economics.” So we can see: Over time, the invective of the moment can have little bearing on the validity of an idea.

Hawley’s idea, which he calls Getting America Back to Work, can be stated simply: During this emergency, the federal government should support wages up to 80% of the national median. It’s an expensive program, to be sure, and yet it’s worked well in places such as the United Kingdom and Denmark.

To which, of course, critics might say, “Aha! Those two countries have elected many leftists! So that’s proof that Hawley is an ideological rogue!” We might pause to note that Reagan himself was once a liberal Democrat, and his famous tax-cut plan was explicitly modeled — as Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser to both Reagan and Trump has explained — after the plan of another liberal Democrat, John F. Kennedy.

Yet it’s probably best if we hear from Laffer himself, directly addressing Hawley’s proposal. On April 20, he and co-author Jonathan Hartley wrote an op-ed for Fox Business endorsing Hawley’s idea.

As the co-authors put it, the $2 trillion CARES Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law on March 27, is well-intentioned, but circuitous. For instance, the loan money for one of the bill’s key elements, the Paycheck Protection Program, aimed at aiding businesses and their employees, can only come after an application to a bank — all overseen by the Small Business Administration.

What’s simpler and faster, Laffer and Hartley argue, is a direct infusion of cash into people’s pockets. As they put it, “Why not deliver a faster and less operationally challenging stimulus through the payroll system that will incentivize employers to keep their workers on payroll and for them not to leave?” And as they note approvingly, that’s exactly what Hawley wants to do.

The two economists further explain, “A recurring biweekly payroll subsidy (rather than a one-time tax credit) would be faster and likely help boost spending because of what behavioral economists call ‘mental accounting,’ that is people are more likely to spend something that they see as a permanent income boost to their income.” (RELATED: Poll: Almost One In Three Americans Have Seen Employment Or Income Disruptions Because Of Coronavirus)

Yes, Hawley’s idea is aimed at getting money into the economy quickly, so that we don’t spiral down into a depression. And okay, it’s not a tax-rate cut, but Laffer likes it because supply-siders have always thought broadly about the general well-being of the nation — they have never been slaves to one or another sectarian ideology. And after all, you can’t have supply without workers.

Indeed, supply-siders such as Reagan, Laffer and Jack Kemp were pragmatic doers; like JFK before them, what they wanted most was to get the country moving again.

To be sure, just as they did with Reagan’s plan, some will worry about the impact of Hawley’s plan on the deficit. And yet in light of the current crisis, the fate of the nation matters more. Indeed, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in March, there’s never been a better time to borrow: “Interest rates are incredibly low, so there’s very little cost of borrowing this money. In different times, we’ll fix the deficit. This is not the time to worry about it.”

Like Hawley himself, the Getting America Back to Work plan is unprecedented in U.S. politics. In fact, just on April 24, Trump signed an additional $484 billion in coronavirus relief, most of the money being dedicated to PPP as opposed to the direct-to-worker approach that Hawley and Laffer prefer. Yet after that, as Americans take stock of where they are and think about what’s needed next, they might wish to take a closer look at Hawley’s plan. And why not? After all, the godfather of supply-side thinks it’s a great idea — and when it comes to greatness, he has a proven track record.

What should we do about water?

From the Babylon Bee:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—At his press conference last night, President Trump told everyone to stay hydrated and drink lots of water.

"Water's tremendous, very powerful stuff," he said. "You won't believe the things they can do with water. Water balloons. Water slides. Water beds. It's amazing. You can freeze it and make ice, I'm told. Ice is great for lots of things. Ice cream. Ice cubes. Igloos."

"Anyway, drink water."

Horrified journalists scrambled to warn Americans not to drown themselves in their pools and bathtubs.

"Trump says water is good -- but this is very misleading," said Rachel Maddow. "Did you know that water kills many people every year? These dangerous, unhinged remarks from the president could cause many to drown themselves. Plus, do you know what's hidden in water? Sharks. This president wants you to die from a shark attack!"

Representatives for various bottled water companies quickly released a statement distancing themselves from the president's remarks and warning everyone not to submerge themselves in the ocean for minutes at a time.

Cacti

All you people who are showing off your tulips, hyacinths, irises have nothing on us New Mexicans. All we need is a few more cacti scattered around!

"The Food Supply Chain is breaking!"

New York (CNN Business)Tyson Foods (TSN) is warning that "millions of pounds of meat" will disappear from the supply chain as the coronavirus pandemic pushes food processing plants to close, leading to product shortages in grocery stores across the country.

"The food supply chain is breaking," wrote board chairman John Tyson in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, Washington Post and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

US farmers don't have anywhere to sell their livestock, he said, adding that "millions of animals — chickens, pigs and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities."

"There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery
stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed," Tyson wrote.
Tyson Foods, which employs roughly 100,000 workers, closed its pork plants in Waterloo, Iowa, and Logansport, Indiana, last week so that workers in those facilities could be tested for the virus.
The Waterloo plant closure came after weeks of public pressure. Production had already slowed there because many of its 2,800 workers had been calling out sick, and local health authorities linked the Tyson plant to 182 cases — nearly half of the county's total.

CNN recently spoke to three employees who work in the facility who expressed ongoing concerns that not enough was done to protect them from Covid-19. One worker said that practicing social distancing inside the facility was nearly impossible to do.

Asked by CNN about those claims, Tyson Foods said that plants were sanitized daily. And Tyson, the chairman, wrote in Sunday's advertisement that the company has taken steps to protect its workers, including taking their temperatures and requiring face masks in all of its facilities. He added that the company is paying out bonuses to frontline workers and truckers, as well as donating food in local communities.

Some of the country's largest abattoirs (processing plants or slaughterhouses) have been forced to cease operations temporarily after thousands of employees across the country have tested positive for the virus.

Pork processing plants have been hit especially hard, with three of the largest in the United States going offline indefinitely— Smithfield Foods in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; JBS pork processing in Worthington, Minnesota; and the Tyson plant in Waterloo, Iowa. Together, the three plants account for approximately 15% of pork production.
-- Dianne Gallagher, Pamela Kirkland and Chauncey Alcorn contributed to this report.

America self-sufficient in energy and food?

The brilliant Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness,

During the Barack Obama years, government agencies had begun to chart a new inclusive future for hoi polloi Americans. We were lectured frequently that the Obama arc of the moral universe was long, but it always bent toward his sense of justice. Translated that meant, like it or not, we Americans had a preordained moral rendezvous with a progressive destiny.

Suburban lifestyles, yards, grass, rural living, and commute driving were to be phased out. High rises, government run-buses, and high-speed rail were in: more people in less space, with less energy consumed, meant less trouble. Granny was better off in a green rest home, not the back bedroom.

Ohio was over; the EU was our future. Clean coal was a 20th-century embarrassment; the next and future Solyndra would be cutting-edge. The idea that the United States ought to be self-sufficient in energy and food seemed worthy of yawns.

...Universities were to speak truth to power in new race/class/gender missions and diversity/inclusion/equality agendas. The old boring curricula of math, science, engineering, literature, language, history, and Western Civ were sputtering out, or recalibrated to include social activist themes.

...All were cynically aware that the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion made enough money to avoid living in a “diverse” neighborhood, put his own kids in a school where all were equally not poor, and wanted to be included among the elite.

There were new winners and losers in a transnational United States, and such university administrators were among the winners.

...In the minds of the new citizens of the world, the ossified working classes, when they were not smelling up Walmart or hiding their missing teeth with corny smiles, were written off as a basket full of deplorables and irredeemables, or the dregs of the earth, or the clingers who always retreat to their guns and religion—the worst nightmare of Robert Mueller’s dream team and all-stars.

...And we were assured by experts and science that the World Health Organization would warn us in plenty of time if a dangerous flu-like bug popped up 7,000 miles away.

...There likely won’t be much of a “new normal.” Because when all the data is in, all the panic ended, the antivirals appearing, all the vaccinations working, the herd immunity growing, and the real lethality rate dropping, most of us, despite the tough barroom talk of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the dreams of governors Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, will go back to business as normal.

Yet we should hope not quite normal, either.

For a brief season in time, we glimpsed from the awful epidemic what was wheat and what was chaff, what was mahogany beneath and what a scrapped thin veneer above, who were the V8s and who the mere gaudy, tail fins—and how America ultimately got by and how it almost didn’t.

Read more here.

"the bitter fruit of the unholy alliance between feminists who have pissed all over centuries of moral restraints and sexually predacious males who agree that such restraints should be abolished."

In the Ace of Spades blog, Oregon Muse explores the Tara Reade case from several important angles here.

Kim Jon Un didn't kill himself

Herd immunity

via the indispensable Oregon Muse

"The curtain has been removed!"

Another brilliant blog post by Sundance in the Conservative Treehouse reads in part,

here was a clear fork in the road and the DOJ took the path toward a cover-up; which, considering what the DOJ was simultaneously doing with Mueller and the EDVA regarding Assange, is not entirely surprising.

Was that decision wrong? Oh hell yes, it was corrupt as heck. .

Were the decisions done with forethought to coverup gross abuses of government? Yes.

Where the DOJ is today is directly connected to the decisions the DOJ made in 2017 and 2018 to protect themselves and internally corrupt actors from discovery.

It is often said: “the coverup is always worse than the crime.” This is never more true than with these examples, because where we are today… now miles down the path of consequence from those corrupt decisions… is seemingly disconnected from the ability of any institutional recovery. That’s now the issue for Bill Barr.

If Bill Barr wanted to deal with the issue he would not be telling President Trump to stop talking about the corruption; instead, he would be holding a large press conference to explain to the American people about that fork in the road.

That type of honest sunlight delivery means taking people back into the background of the larger story and explaining what decisions were made; with brutal honesty and without trepidation for the consequences, regardless of their severity and regardless of the friends of Bill Barr compromised by the truth.

Here’s a big reason why Bill Barr should take that approach: We Know.

We know; the DOJ trying to hide it doesn’t change our level of information.

Regardless of whether Bill Barr actually admits what surrounds him, there are people who know…

We know….

You know….

AG Bill Barr shouting at President Trump ‘don’t tweet‘ like the Wizard of Oz doesn’t change the fact the curtain has been removed.

Turn around Bill, it’s time to come clean

Read much more here.

Their daughter loves dogs and it was her birthday, so...

From Misanthropic Humanitarian:


The neighbors gave her a birthday surprise!

Via Misanthropic Humanitarian

Injecting disinfectant?

Ann Althouse criticizes President Trump for his remarks

Claiming something is sarcasm when it didn't much strike anybody as sarcasm seems to be a new trick, and I don't think he should be practicing it in front of a gigantic audience of hundreds of millions of people — especially people who are struggling through something serious and hoping for something to feel hopeful about. Even if he'd practiced that particular sarcastic move in small clubs for years and honed the wording and delivery, I don't think it would ever have been right for the White House stage. And I appreciate Trump's spontaneity and rhetoric. You can see that in my posts over the last few years. But not everything works, and sarcasm is a bad choice in the Task Force briefing context. It mixes false statements in with the truth, but you're supposed to get it, because it's funny. Fortunately, the move backfires.

And that's assuming it he was telling the truth when he called it sarcasm, which I don't think he was. But assuming... Let's assume that when he said, "I see the disinfectant... is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside... it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me," he could have leaned more heavily into the sarcasm and said "I see the disinfectant kills the virus, so why don't we just inject the disinfection right into the patient?! That sounds like it just might work! How about all you doctors get on my brilliant idea right away and divert resources into experiments?! I'm sure some of these crazy reporters would love to volunteer to have Clorox injected right into them. Come on, you paragons of ethics, roll up your sleeves." Then we'd all see the sarcasm. So is that what Trump meant to do, but in a subtler style?

I don't believe it, but as I said, it backfires. Trump isn't the only one who gets to use humor. Social media blew up with jokes about Trump and the injected disinfectant. And then he drastically shortened the next press briefing. It wasn't so fun anymore. I'm glad that check on his power worked. Freedom of speech is not just for Presidents. And humor coming from a person wielding immense power — taking advantage of a captive audience — is problematic. I think Trump is a fantastic standup comedian. I enjoy his performances. But some jokes fail.

And some things that are not jokes get called jokes after the fact, which is what I think happened here. Trump undercuts his own reputation as a humorist when he labels one of his non-humor statements as humor. So why did he do that? Desperation? I told you yesterday how I thought he'd try to deal with disinfectant-injectiongate.
1. He'll say it's "fake news"... They said I recommended injecting bleach.... Who would say that?...

2. He'll rephrase his idea so it's situated in a context that makes some sense... how feasible is it to kill the virus once it does get inside the body?...

3. He was just asking the question of the expert, drawing him out....
But he didn't do any of those things. He did something I didn't even think of, calling it sarcasm. It's a little demoralizing to those of us who have been giving him a sympathetic listen. Maybe I'm demoralized because I didn't find myself on the inside, with the people who understood the sarcasm. Did anyone understand it as sarcasm?

"John Nolte writes in Breitbart, giving us sixteen reasons why he believes Tara Reade instead of Joe Biden."

Primarily because I incorrectly believed her story had changed over the course of a year, had moved from unwanted touching to a flat-out sexual assault, I at first had trouble believing Tara Reade’s claim she was sexually assaulted by presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden in 1993.

When Reade originally came forward in April of 2019, she joined about a half-dozen women who have credibly accused Biden of unwanted touching. And I say “credibly” because Biden has serially committed acts of unwanted touching in public. We have countless videos of Biden making women and children uncomfortable with inappropriate hair-sniffing, nuzzling, kissing, and getting handsy.

Now, however, Reade tells a much more lurid and disturbing story of being sexually assaulted by Biden. While working for the then-Delaware Senator while in her mid-20s, she says he cornered her in a hallway, thrust his hands up her skirt, penetrated her vagina, and when she objected, he said something to the effect of, “Come on, I heard you like me.”

Reade further alleges that after she complained, there was retaliation. She lost her job.

So here are the reasons why I now believe Joe Biden sexually assaulted Tara Reade…

Reade Did Not Change Her Story
The allegation Reade changed her story is false. She still claims Biden engaged in unwanted touching but that this was separate from the assault. She also says there’s a paper trail backing up this claim. She filed a complaint against Biden over the unwanted touching — something I will address below.

Experts Say Assault Victims Frequently Don’t Tell the Full Story All at Once
Rich McHugh, one of the investigative reporters who worked with Ronan Farrow to break the Harvey Weinstein story and who says he finds Reade’s allegation “credible,” also says he has seen this before:

“A number of [Weinstein’s victims] didn’t come out with their full story to us at the time,” he states. “For obvious reasons they are wrestling with whether they trust you as a reporter, whether they want to go out with the full horrific story that’s going to be Google-able for the rest of their life.” He asserts many survivors have told him they did not tell their “full story at the time because they didn’t feel comfortable” and that he does not see this as an issue.

And again, Reade did not change her story, she simply added more details.

Reade is a Lifelong Democrat
Reade did support Bernie Sanders during the primary, but why would she risk a second Donald Trump term by continuing to push the issue now that Bernie’s dropped out?

Reade Worked in Biden’s Senate Office in 1993
This might sound simplistic, but it’s important to remember how apeshit Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) went over Christine Blasey Ford’s now-debunked allegations against Brett Kavanaugh when she could not even establish she ever knew Kavanaugh.

So, yes, in this climate, it is worth noting that Reade knew and worked for Biden during the time in question.

Witness Number One
Reade told her brother about the alleged sexual assault at the time it happened. McHugh has talked to Reade’s brother and says the details of their stories are the same.

Witness Number Two
Reade told a friend about the alleged sexual assault at the time it happened. McHugh has talked to Reade’s friend and says the details of their stories are the same.

Witness Number Three
Reade told a friend about the alleged assault about 15 years after it happened, so sometime around 2008. McHugh has talked to this woman and this woman confirms Reade told her a “horrific” story about Biden.

Witness Number Four
McHugh spoke with an intern who worked under Reade in Biden’s Senate office at the time. The intern knew nothing about the alleged assault, but McHugh says, “she said … in mid-April of 1993, Tara was abruptly no longer her supervisor. So the timing matches exactly with what Tara was saying.”

And what Reade is saying is that she was fired for filing a complaint.

Reade Invites Scrutiny
Unlike Blasey Ford, who hid behind her lawyers and little girl voice, Reade is inviting scrutiny, has asked investigative reporters like McHugh to dig into the details of her allegation.

Liars never invite scrutiny. They dodge it and look for excuses to avoid it.

Scrutiny Has Only Bolstered Reade’s Claim
Since Reade invited this scrutiny, details have only bolstered her claim, not contradicted it. Most notably…

Mom’s Anguished Call to Larry King Live
Reade has been telling interviewers she told her mother, Jeanette Altimus, at the time about the alleged assault. Unfortunately, Altimus passed in 2016, so there is no way to verify this… Except there is…

Reade’s been telling journalists that sometime in 1993 her mother called into CNN’s Larry King Live asking for advice about her daughter’s problems with a “prominent senator.”

That video clip has now been found, and is a crucial and damning piece of evidence in support of Reade’s allegation.

The University of Delaware Refuses to Open Biden’s Senate Papers
According to McHugh, if Reade did indeed file a sexual harassment complaint, it would be among Biden’s senate papers, which are currently held at the University of Delaware. The university, however, told McHugh it will not allow anyone access to those papers until two years after Biden retires from public office.

Biden Is Not Demanding the University of Delaware Open His Papers
Look at the difference between Kavanaugh and Biden…

Kavanaugh could not wait to defend himself in public, to put forth all the documentation asked for, to do whatever he could to invite whatever scrutiny was required to prove his innocence.

Biden, on the other hand, is in hiding. He has not even said a word about the allegation (it helps that in a series of interviews with friendly fake reporters like Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper, and George Stephanopoulos, he wasn’t asked).

Further, Biden is not asking the University of Delaware to throw open his senate papers while begging reporters to dig through them knowing this will prove no one filed a sexual harassment complaint against him.

Biden is acting like a guilty man. The guilty have everything to hide.

Innocent men, like Kavanaugh, have nothing to hide.

The Media are Terrified of This Story
Within a few weeks, on top of countless hours of broadcast time, CNN published nearly 700 stories in support of Blasey Ford’s ridiculous lies.

As of this writing, CNN has published only two stories about Reade, both of them favorable to Biden.

No one in the media have dared ask Biden about the allegation, and when the media do bring it up, they try to write Reade off as a crank, as an unstable Putin supporter (an allegation McHugh says is false).

Those of us of a certain age remember all too well that this is exactly what the media did to Bill Clinton’s victims. Paula Jones was smeared as trailer trash. Monica Lewinsky was defamed as a crazed stalker. Kathleen Willey was slandered as an unstable gold digger. Juanita Broaddrick was swept under the rug. And just like today’s so-called #MeToo activists, just like Alyssa Milano and Hilary Rosen today (both have endorsed and stand by Biden), Clinton-era feminists gleefully joined this appalling jihad.

If the media believed they could debunk and discard Reade’s allegation with facts, they would be all over this story. They know they can’t, so they are treating it like its radioactive — because it is.

Biden Has a Long Pattern of Inappropriate Touching
Biden’s sense of entitlement when it comes to inappropriately touching women and CHILDREN, is well-established. If he behaves this way in public, imagine his behavior in private.

Reade Faces Prison If She’s Lying
Last month, Reade filed a formal criminal complaint against Biden, and one of the penalties for filing a false complaint is prison.

So while Reade is inviting investigative reporters to dig into and possibly debunk her allegation, she is also risking prison if that debunking occurs.

—

Bottom line…

Reade is behaving like someone desperate to expose a terrible truth, while Biden is behaving like someone with something terrible to hide.

Additional evidence could certainly change my mind. But right now the only people who do not want this investigated are Joe Biden and his media allies.

Have Democrats painted themselves in a corner?

Thomas Lifson writes in the American Thinker,

Democrats have painted themselves into a corner with Joe Biden now the presumptive nominee. I see no easy way out of the mess that has been created by assembling a coalition of mutually antagonistic grievance groups, while simultaneously assuaging the oligarchs that fund the party and usually call the shots behind the scenes.

Now that Tara Reade has credibly accused Joe Biden of sexual assault with far more evidence than was brought against Justice Kavanaugh, they are stuck. The hysteria unleashed against Kavanaugh can’t be forgotten, even though dishonest hacks like Mazie Hirono keep their yaps shut and don’t even whisper “Believe all women,” and even though propaganda outfits like CNN have done their best to keep news of the accusations from the public.

You see, the Bernie bros still have their delegates, and still chafe at the way the nomination is being denied to their hero. Should Biden withdraw, they will insist that Bernie take his place. They are true believers and will not be persuaded by the argument that defeating Trump calls for them to sacrifice their dream of a Marxist president.

They will not shut up about Ms. Reade’s complaints, and are pointing out the embarrassing contrast in the way her evidence-supported accusations are being treated and the blizzard of coverage given to the evidence-free accusations of Christine Blasey-Ford. They are the reason that even CNN and CBS News have finally covered the Reade accusations,

Should Biden’s candidacy be deep-sixed, the Bernie bros are not about to sit by and watch it be handed to Andrew Cuomo, the current poster boy for the Dem establishmentarians. Cuomo has no delegates and isn’t a Marxist. They have already in the past threatened to burn Milwaukee if the convention spurns them, and I doubt that Cuomo would be acceptable over their guy, who actually campaigned for president and won delegates.

The wages of identity politics are strife among identity groups. The Democrats have nobody but themselves to blame for the pickle in which they find themselves.

Surfers leading the way in Southern California lockdown protests

In the American Thinker, Monica Showalter has videos of surfers protesting beach closures in Southern California and adds relevant commentary here.

"Buried under a mountain of hypocrisy"

Roger L. Simon writes in the Epoch Times about the Kavanaugh allegations, which

was for an incident that allegedly took place around 1983, some 10 years earlier than Reade’s, with no evidence whatsoever that it ever happened, no corroboration of date, time, or venue from anybody. There was never even any proof that accuser Christine Blasey Ford actually knew Kavanaugh. (It’s also worth noting that several of those same over-zealous, to put it mildly, senators now wish to be vice president. For shame.)

Reade, as mentioned, actually worked for Biden—no one denies that—until a few days after the alleged incident, which is when Reade’s mother called King. This is evidence, clearly, but not entirely dispositive, although her brother and a friend who wishes to remain anonymous have also corroborated that Reade told them of the assault at the time. That’s three more than Blasey Ford ever had, with more likely to come. (Evidentiary material is rumored to exist in a closed Biden archive at the University of Delaware.)

The incident, despite the media coverup, can no longer be ignored. Now even the #MeToo crowd is going to have log in, if they have any intention of salvaging their movement, which will otherwise be buried under a mountain of hypocrisy.

...This is a prospective nightmare for the Democrats. Trump may have been a playboy, a particularly active one, but Biden’s action, if believed, moves him into the area of perversion and outright misogyny.

He must disprove it, but how? He’s unlikely to win if he doesn’t, and even if he does, carrying such an accusation into the presidency potentially undermines everything he does and our country with it.

A lie detector test, unreliable as that may be, is a possible solution. Both Joe and Tara should take one.

Of course, this presents a serious danger for Biden:

As a reminder for those who have forgotten the seminal Roman legal doctrine of “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” (if you lie in one thing, you’ll lie in everything), Joe doesn’t have a particular reputation for honesty. He was caught plagiarizing three times—the first time in law school, of all places, and then twice from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock.

America, we are in uncharted waters. First the CCP virus, now this.

Read more here.

He forgets a lot.

In Townhall Beth Baumann has eighteen videos of Joe Biden forgetting so far in his campaign.

Dr. Fauci granted $3.7 million of taxpayer money in 2015 to the Wuhan lab that may have leaked the virus that is killing us!

In Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft reports in part,

Back in 2015 the NIH under the direction of Dr. Tony Fauci gave a $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is now the main suspect in leaking the coronavirus that has killed more than 50,000 Americans and, thanks to Dr. Fauci again, destroyed the US economy.

As early as 2018 US State Department officials warned about safety risks at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab on scientists conducting risky tests with the bat coronavirus.

US officials made several trips to the Wuhan laboratory.

...On Sunday Rudy Giuliani dropped a bomb on Dr. Fauci. Rudy scolded the NIAID Director of granting $3.7 million to the Wuhan lab that leaked the coronavirus.

And then Rudy accused the NIH of knowing more than they are leading on.

The Washington Examiner reported: Rudy Giuliani questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci’s involvement in grants from the United States to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that has been tied to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to a report, the U.S. Intelligence Community has growing confidence that the current coronavirus strain may have accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than from a wildlife market, as the Chinese Communist Party first claimed. During a Sunday interview on The Cats Roundtable, Giuliani questioned why the U.S. gave money to the lab.

“Back in 2014, the Obama administration prohibited the U.S. from giving money to any laboratory, including in the U.S., that was fooling around with these viruses. Prohibited! Despite that, Dr. Fauci gave $3.7 million to the Wuhan laboratory — even after the State Department issued reports about how unsafe that laboratory was, and how suspicious they were in the way they were developing a virus that could be transmitted to humans,” he claimed.

He added, “We never pulled that money. Something here is going on, John. I don’t want to make any accusations. But there was more knowledge about what was going on in China with our scientific people than they disclosed to us when this first came out. Just think of it: If this laboratory turns out to be the place where the virus came from, then we paid for it. We paid for the damn virus that’s killing us.”

Read more here.

End the lockdowns!

Sundance in the Conservative Treehouse has a roundup of stories from across America of people exercising their Constitutional rights to protest the lockdown orders of various authoritarian politicians.

"I think, in my case, that democracy died in that corridor in 1993.”

Mary Margaret Olohan updates us in the Daily Caller on Tara Reade's efforts to tell the world about her experiences with Democrat candidate Joe Biden.

The problems with mail-in ballots

In Real Clear Politics, Mark Hemingway explains the issues with mail-in voting. More than 28 million ballots went missing in the last four elections. Read more here.

"Power once taken is not returned voluntarily."

Mark Rippetoe writes in part in PJ Media,

...Two things must immediately be considered, not just by the fitness industry but by all businesses having the misfortune to be labeled “non-essential”:

What happens next time a novel disease makes the rounds? One of the facts about life on this planet is that we share it with other life forms, some of which are contagious diseases. It has always been this way, and always will. Some of us will die of contagious disease, and the poorer our health, the greater the likelihood of this happening. Use of the gym makes us healthier and stronger – that's why we do it.

But the government has just shown us exactly what will happen next time such a disease comes along. They have removed all doubt about who decides whether gyms and other “non-essential” businesses are “allowed” to operate. Their owners and the market for their services have been declared irrelevant in favor of the wisdom of mayors, county judges, and governors. In the absence of the passage of very strong laws preventing this very action – perhaps as unlikely an event as the explosion of the sun – these businesses will face periodic arbitrary closure from now on. Power once taken is not returned voluntarily.

In consideration of this, how likely is a bank or an investor to lend money to anybody contemplating the silly idea of opening a “non-essential” business? How likely is a commercial landlord to lease to a business that cannot afford to pay its rent every other winter? Is a nice sit-down restaurant or any bar a viable business under these circumstances? Will all food be take-out from now on, or will Walmart and Home Depot, with their now-incalculably-valuable “essential” status, move into the food-service sector, with restaurants inside their essential stores? The questions boggle the mind.

...This is a catastrophe of our own making. We have responded to a bad situation in a shameful way. Some of us have given up liberty for perceived safety, and some of us have seized power in this undeniably rich opportunity to abuse cowardice. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such an insult. And it will – it always does.

Read more here.

Clarifying

Oh, really?

Via Steven Hayward in PowerLine, who introduces his Week in Pictures with this comment:

Edna St. Vincent-Millay is reported to have once said that “History isn’t one damn thing after another—it’s the same damn thing over and over again.” That certainly describes the day-to-day news cycle right now, and the challenge of doing the weekly picture gallery. Have you heard? There’s a pandemic! And Orange Man Bad. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the pandemic of predatory politicians and the mindless media is going away soon. But cheer up. We can start the weekend with this:

"There is no way to sugarcoat this. Cuomo has blood on his hands!"

Glenn Reynolds links to a story in the New York Post.

The first coronavirus patients admitted to a Queens nursing home under a controversial state mandate arrived along with some grim accessories — a supply of body bags, The Post has learned.

An executive at the facility — which was previously free of the deadly disease — said the bags were in the shipment of personal protective equipment received the same day the home was forced to begin treating two people discharged from hospitals with COVID-19.

“My colleague noticed that one of the boxes was extremely heavy. Curious as to what could possibly be making that particular box so much heavier than the rest, he opened it,” the exec told The Post Thursday.

“The first two coronavirus patients were accompanied by five body bags.”

Within days, three of the bags were filled with the first of 30 residents who would die there after Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Health Department handed down its March 25 directive that bars nursing homes from refusing to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients, the exec said.

Like clockwork, the nursing home has received five body bags a week — every week — from city officials.

“Cuomo has blood on his hands. He really does. There’s no way to sugarcoat this,” the health care executive added.

Is she a reliable narrator?

In PJ Media, Jim Treacher takes a look at the story about the man who drank fish tank cleaner. More importantly, he takes a look at the guy's wife and the media here.

An admirer

From the Babylon Bee:

BEIJING—In a candid speech Tuesday, President Xi Jinping stated he was "pretty impressed" by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, specifically praising her totalitarian policies.

China's dictator said he was actually a little jealous he hadn't thought of some of her ideas himself.

"She has some pretty great ideas -- stopping people from gathering together even with their families, ordering people not to buy seeds -- they can't even plant their own food now! We hadn't even thought of some of these innovative approaches," the Communist president said. "We're always looking for more ways to oppress people, and we were really inspired by Whitmer's approach."

"Not bad, Gretchen."

Other dictators across the world also chimed in with words of support and affirmation for Whitmer's policies, from North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un to Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei.

The Chinese government quickly offered Governor Whitmer a consulting position with the Communist Party of China, which she readily accepted.

Touching

From the Babylon Bee:

Former President Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden for president in a touching, intimate video Tuesday, saying, "Biden has touched us all."

Many were worried Obama wasn't going to endorse Biden, but he came through for the DNC establishment, telling everyone how deeply and personally Biden has touched everyone he has ever worked with.

"Many leaders, um, you know, they, um, don't rub you the right way," Obama said. "But not Joe. Joe, see, he, um, touches everyone he comes into contact with, whether they want him to or not. He's breathing down Trump's neck in, um, in the race now, and I know he will overcome and grab a come-from-behind victory. I'm very fondle--excuse me--very fond of Joe, and with a stroke of luck, we'll be able to lick Trump in this election as we grope about for the White House."

Obama brought his patented brand of eloquent, hope-infused rhetoric to the speech, saying, "We can, um, smell a win this year."

"Joe's campaign is very touching, that's what I'm, um, here to say. So don't let a Trump victory sneak up on us -- embrace Joe Biden in 2020."

Reopen the economy!

Steve McCann writes in part in the American Thinker,

...Americans Now Know the Ruling Class Sold the Nation Out to China

While the American public has long been suspicious of Chinese influence in America, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed for all to see the extent of this nation’s reliance on a global adversary for necessities such as medical and pharmaceutical products. And that the single-minded pursuit of wealth and power prompted the American ruling class to proclaim over the years that it was a great benefit for the United States to empower China.

China owes its faster than expected rise as a world power to the transfer of American jobs, technology, capital, and business acumen to China so that US shareholders could receive capital gains, US executives could receive incentive pay for producing consumer products at a much lower labor cost, and the nation’s elites could, using riches from Chinese investments in the US, consolidate their retention of power.

Apparently, the American ruling class could not comprehend that if US corporations produce the goods they market to Americans offshore, it is the offshore countries that benefit the most from the economic activity. If that location is an authoritarian regime bent on world domination, then they will use their newfound wealth to build up their military, exploit and suppress their citizenry, promote manufacturing dependence, and corrupt the governing classes of their potential adversaries.

...The original purpose of the shutdown was to “flatten the curve” and slow the spread. Which has been accomplished. The time has come to reopen the economy. Except many of the denizens of the ruling class insist on moving the goalposts and setting targets that can never be met before the country reopens. They are insisting on universal testing (an impossibility) and a vaccine (which will take up to 18 months) before the nation can get back to work. In other words, a guaranteed safe world -- there can be no more outbreaks and deaths from the virus. They intend to hold President Trump politically responsible for a reopening that in any way fails to meet these unattainable metrics.

The fate of untold millions of Americans mired in an economic and societal depression is immaterial as long as the economy and the nation are in shambles come November 3, 2020. The people be damned as long as Donald Trump and his populist movement, the most serious threat the ruling class has ever faced, are permanently defeated.

Read more here.

"For Democrats the coronavirus crisis is an opportunity to destroy the economy, defeat Trump, and get Americans used to following orders – no matter how absurd."

Don Feder reports in part in FrontPage Magazine,

Initially, fascists operate through the framework of a democracy. Hitler came to power democratically.

But, little by little, citizens become subjects – surrendering hard-won freedoms to meet “the crisis” at hand – economic collapse, power said to be concentrated in the wrong hands (the 1%, or the Jews), climate change or a pandemic. Liberty is leached away. If people meekly obey, the fascists are encouraged to go further and further.

Propaganda is an important part of any fascist movement. The Democrats’ propaganda machine – AKA: the mainstream media -- is finely tuned and can turn on a dime.

Currently, anyone who suggests that restrictions should be lifted is irresponsible and a danger to society. In February, suggesting that changes may be needed to counter the outbreak was said to promote panic. In both cases, Democrats said Trump was to blame.

...Former Obama advisor and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said never let a crisis go to waste. For Democrats the coronavirus crisis is an opportunity to destroy the economy, defeat Trump, and get Americans used to following orders – no matter how absurd.

As they move toward their nominating convention, perhaps the Democrats should have armbands to complement their face masks.

Read more here.

Hilarious satire on media coverage of the pandemic

Ace of Spades found on Twitter this hilarious satire of media coverage of the pandemic.

All of mainstream media: pic.twitter.com/vn0m9cJMle

— Larry Johnson (@2LarryJohnson7) April 22, 2020