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October 2020

Biden: Voters have no right to know his position on court-packing By Andrea Widburg

http://Biden: Voters have no right to know his position on court-packing By Andrea Widburg

But that’s not the only bad and stupid thing he said on Saturday.

On Saturday, Joe Biden angrily insisted that voters don’t deserve to know whether he intends to expand the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Further, according to Biden, the timing of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination is unconstitutional because it was done “after voting has already begun.” This statement shows appalling historical and constitutional ignorance.

Biden announced what he thinks voters are entitled to know during an interview with Ross DiMattei, of KTNV Action News in Las Vegas. DiMattei almost apologetically said, “Sir, I’ve got to ask you about packing the courts, and I know that….”

An apparently relaxed Biden interjected, “Sure.”

DiMattei continued, “You said yesterday you aren’t going to answer the question until after the election. But this is the number one thing that I’ve been asked about from viewers in the past couple of days.”

“Well,” said Biden, ready to place the blame, “you’ve been asked by the viewers who are probably Republicans, who don’t want me continuing to talk about what they’re doing to the court right now.”

DiMattei was not intimidated. “But, sir, don’t the voters deserve to know….”

Biden aggressively cut him off. “No, they don’t de….”

It sounds as if Biden was going to say, “No, they don’t deserve to know.” However, some residual common sense kicked in, and he stopped himself. Instead, Biden angrily said, “I’m not gonna play his game.” Presumably, Biden was referring to President Trump.

Cancel Culture in Bayonne, New Jersey By Joshua Sotomayor-Einstein

http://Cancel culture reaches working-class America.

From the organized campaign vilifying Harry Potter author JK Rowling for standing up for women’s actual biological experience to decades of Democrat attempts to paint Republicans as every type of bigot; cancel culture, the totalitarian leftist movement to destroy those with whom they disagree, isn’t just international or national. In Bayonne, NJ, it’s local. Making matters worse in the following chain of deplorable events is the fact that the online mob driving it, safe behind blocked phone numbers, closed social media groups (magnifying the worst impulses of already bad agents), and anonymous emails, has targeted local businesses already on life support due to COVID-19 and the resultant economic restrictions. The decomposing cherry on this putrid pie is both the silence from the only people with anything to gain from fueling the hate and the rotten stink of a possible coverup. 

Our story begins with Michael Shatravka, a Bayonne resident with a checkered teenage and young adult past who, after a literally bone-shattering motorcycle accident, made the decision to do better. Shatravka, stuck in physical therapy for over a year, chose not to hate the world for his past bad decisions. After relearning how to walk and talk, Shatravka entered the world of acting for three years and then created his own videography and photography company as well as obtaining his real-estate license. Along the way, he met and married the love of his life and decided he didn’t like the direction in which Bayonne’s public schools were heading because they were, according to his observation, leaving too many kids behind who might fall into the same bad decisions he himself almost succumbed to.

Shatravka’s business life, his entrepreneurial and community minded can-do attitude, and the business life of Buon Appetito, the charming old-world style Italian restaurant on Bayonne’s main drag, came under fire late this September. Shatravka, through his videography and editing business, was contracted by the community eatery to make a commercial. Little did Buon Appetito (beloved by so much of Bayonne for their tasty and large portions) or Shatravka know that the mere existence of his 2020 virgin Board of Education run would set the brave soldiers of the couch-potato keyboard brigade on their cancel culture crusade. Locked in their sights were two targets — Shatravka’s videography business and Buon Appetito, whose ownership may not have even know of Shatravka’s BoE run and who may not even share his perspective. For Shatravka and other businesses like Buon Appetito, the only thing that matters is having a vibrant home town where people can agree or disagree over good food and enjoy each other’s company.

Not so for Bayonne’s cancel culture crusaders who began calling, emailing, and posting on social media to boycott Buon Appetito unless the eatery disavowed all connections for Shatravka and withdrew the commercial his business made them. The message was sent – associate with anyone on the Make Bayonne Great Again ticket, the slate of three BoE candidates including Shatravka and one of the two main municipal Board of Education slates, even in ways that has nothing to do with the BoE election, or people, possibly from Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis’s political camp would come after your businesses.

Trump-Hating Journalists Write Fiction, Not News Itxu Diaz *****

https://spectator.org/trump-hating-journalists-write-fiction-not-news/

Hardly any journalists get scoops anymore because almost everybody already knows everything. A couple of afternoons ago, in the fruit shop, the lady who has worked there for as long as I can remember greeted me with arched eyebrows and arms locked in pre-election campaign position: “So you’re the one who writes all these fascist articles?” My answer was almost as stupid as her question: “Give me six ripe tomatoes too, if you please.” Information travels faster than my reflexes. And I’m starting to get used to the idea of journalists storming into newsrooms, sweating, bursting with some big exclusive, only to sit down, start writing it up, and discover, crushed, that someone has already been dancing to it for three days on TikToc.
 

The era of the journalism we saw in The Front Page has passed. Walter Burns was a scoundrel, but at least he did it to sell newspapers. These days, the most exciting thing that comes out of any of those old newspaper offices is the tweet of an intern who has published some personal obscenity by mistake on the newspaper’s Twitter feed. And the worst thing is that most of the followers won’t notice the difference. Without a doubt, authorial and analytical journalism is an honorable and pertinent way out of the eternal crisis that long ago left our business looking like Wile E. Coyote, right after the stick of dynamite went off in his face.

Unfortunately, not all the press has chosen to find an honorable way out. I’ve discovered these days, with certain surprise, that fiction-journalism is back, although in a much more tedious version. No, it is not the gonzo journalism of the great Hunter S. Thompson. For that you need talent. No, this is prophetical news. We didn’t see that coming. I would never have imagined that this prolonged crisis of journalism would lead to the horoscopes jumping out of the back pages onto the very front page. The new section chiefs will be witches!

5 Major Ways America Will Fundamentally Change If Biden Packs The Court By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/09/5-major-ways-america-will-fundamentally-change-if-biden-packs-the-court/

Joe Biden refuses to say whether he will support packing or expanding the Supreme Court to ensure a progressive majority if he is elected president. Given that such a move would be the most significant change in how America is governed in recent memory, and a break with 150 years of precedent, it is fair to conclude that his refusal to reject the option means he is open to it.

But the idea of “packing the court” is somewhat esoteric for many Americans not glued to the machinations of our federal government. Should the Democrats choose to expand the court by at least four members to provide for a 7-6 majority assuming Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, it is important for Americans to understand how this drastic maneuver will change their lives and their country.

Let’s lay out five potentially major changes to American life and society that court packing would result in.

1. Gun Rights

“The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.” This was written in an amicus brief from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and four other Democrats in a 2019 case involving the NRA and the State of New York. It was an implicit threat to pack the court if it refused to side with Democrats on restrictive measures that would not even allow people to transport unloaded guns to a gun range. So in this case, we have a very good idea of what Democrats have in mind.

A 7-6 progressive majority on the court would very likely overturn decades of precedent that have protected gun owners from both state and federal attempts to deny them their Second Amendment rights. Millions of American gun owners would be subject to these changes and the laws, which Democrats, some of whom are committed to confiscating guns, would impose.

Is Great Barrington Declaration a Solution to Endless COVID Lockdowns?By Alex Berezow, PhD

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/10/07/great-barrington-declaration-solution-endless-covid-lockdowns-15074

The proposal in the Declaration is certainly worth considering. If I was a policymaker, I would investigate how to implement it. As COVID cases spike in Europe, which once had the coronavirus under control, it’s becoming clear that our current on-again, off-again approach to containment isn’t working as intended. It may be time to try something new. 

Let’s be honest. As we approach late autumn and then winter in the northern hemisphere, nobody knows what’s going to happen. We may see another surge in coronavirus cases, or we may not. We may see flu season exacerbate the effects of COVID, or we may not. We just don’t know.

Making the situation worse is that this uncertainty is absolutely killing the economy. Go downtown in any major American city. It’s a ghost town. We can’t live like this indefinitely. Is there some other approach that we can take as a society to minimize the harm of COVID while maximizing productivity and happiness? A group of successful and respected infectious disease experts says yes, and they have written a statement that they have called the Great Barrington Declaration.

The authors refer to their approach as “Focused Protection,” the gist of which is “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Not that this really matters (because public health policy shouldn’t be a popularity contest), but more than 10,000 scientists and medical practitioners have signed it.

Are the authors right? I certainly think so. Back in May, we reported on a Swedish epidemiologist who believed that lockdowns did nothing other than delay the inevitable; i.e., they simply push new infections down the timeline. Therefore, while lockdowns can be useful to avoid overwhelming hospital bed capacity, they may not lower the overall number of cases. In other words, we’re destroying the economy while essentially accomplishing nothing.

Yes, Hillary Clinton Ordered the Russia-Collusion Farce  By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/hillary-clinton-orchestrated-russia-collusion-farce/

The Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump-Russia collusion farce.

Did she or didn’t she?

Of course she did. In late July 2016, Hillary Clinton, in an effort to divert attention from the email scandal that was haunting her presidential bid, directed her campaign to peddle a political narrative that Russia’s suspected hacking and leaking of Democratic Party emails was in furtherance of a conspiracy between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to swing the election to Trump.

That is, as I argued in Ball of Collusion, the Clinton campaign dreamed up, paid for, and peddled the Trump–Russia collusion farce. And in promoting it, President Obama’s former secretary of state had a willing and able partner in the Obama administration — very much including its intelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.

Democrats Change Their Tune

It was amazing to watch Democrats play Twister this week, as National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe added documentary corroboration to the disclosure he’d made the week before. In that first revelation, via letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ratcliffe explained that, because our spy agencies have very effective foreign-intelligence-gathering methods, they were able to “obtain insight” into a Russian intelligence analysis that concluded Clinton orchestrated the damaging political narrative. That is, Clinton actually did what she accused Trump of doing: She colluded with Russians (through yet another foreigner she recruited to meddle in the 2016 presidential campaign: the ludicrous former British spy Christopher Steele) in order to damage Trump’s campaign and cinch the election for herself. 

Eyes + Ears = 50! By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/eyes-ears-50

Do these idiots think that after watching this criminality for five months, any sane American will vote for a Democrat?
Last March brought us the results of the caucus and primary votes of the Democrat 2020 contest for the U.S. presidency. Out of a U.S. population of about 330 million—some stats include 40 million illegals, which brings the total to 370 million—the best Democrats had to offer was about 15 unimpressive candidates who the public saw through and sent packing. Left in the contest were:

Senator Bernie Sanders, an energized 78-year-old white, Jewish Marxist from Vermont, a keen admirer of Fidel Castro and Mother Russia—who represents his constituents as an Independent—who had recently survived a heart attack. 
Joe Biden, a 77-year-old, white, pro-abortion Catholic, former senator from Delaware for 36 years, VP of the U.S. for eight years under Barack Obama, and, even last March, clearly in the early-to-mid stages of dementia. 

Locking Down the Constitution By Tom McCaffrey

https://canadafreepress.com/article/locking-down-the-constitution

These Governors have enabled a slow-rolling insurrection by Black Lives Matter and the Antifa Brownshirts to come into being; and they will likely throw the coming presidential election into chaos

California governor Gavin Newsom has moved the covid lockdown goalposts for a second time. Per last week’s decree, larger counties in the state must “address inequity in communities such as low-income, Black, Latino, Pacific Islander and essential workers.”

Counties with a population greater than 106,000 must follow an equity metric to ensure that their most disadvantaged neighborhoods don’t lag behind. Counties with less than 106,000 residents must submit a plan that defines their disproportionately affected population and show plans to invest in at least interrupting disease transmission in these populations. (CAP Radio, Oct. 8, 2020 )

Mr. Newsom does not see a great need to allow Californians to go back to work any time soon

It appears Mr. Newsom does not see a great need to allow Californians to go back to work any time soon. It also appears that he is enjoying his new, dictatorial powers. And, if recent history is any guide, he has little reason to fear that the courts will interfere with his exercise of those powers. 

This past May, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, found California’s covid-19 restriction that limited indoor church attendance to 25 percent of building capacity or no more than 100 persons to be “consistent with the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.” The Court’s majority did not issue an opinion, but in a concurrence with the ruling, Chief Justice Roberts argued that, because the restriction did not discriminate against religious organizations but, instead, applied equally or more forcefully to “lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances,” it did not violate the Free Exercise Clause. 

Thanks to Trump, China’s Huawei Is Dying by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16621/trump-china-huawei

• Vice President Biden may say he will be tougher on China than Trump, but his supporters have signaled that he will not. Max Baucus, who served as ambassador to China in the Obama years, predicted that, with a Biden win, there would be a “reset” in U.S.-China relations.
• So, expect chip companies to lobby a President Biden to restart the flow of chips to Huawei Technologies. The sound of a pen gliding over the signature line on a waiver is music to the ears of one Shenzhen-based threat to the United States—as well as its masters in Beijing.

By cutting off the supply of semiconductors, the Trump administration is severely undermining the viability of China’s Huawei Technologies, currently the world’s leading manufacturer of both telecom networking gear and smartphones.
And as goes Huawei, so goes China’s ambitions of dominating global communications.
Washington has accused Huawei of persistent theft of U.S. intellectual property. In addition, the current administration believes the company poses a national security threat because Beijing uses its equipment to surreptitiously take data flowing through its servers and other networking gear.

Biden’s Pseudoscientific Masquerade David Catron

https://spectator.org/biden-covid-follow-science/

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden insists that, if he wins the November election, his COVID-19 policies will “follow the science.” This would certainly be a welcome departure from his rhetoric regarding the pandemic. Biden’s public statements, particularly on mask mandates, general lockdowns, and in-person education, are clearly at odds with the recommendations of an increasing number of epidemiologists and public health scientists. His continued advocacy of countermeasures that have proven ineffective or even harmful suggest that the former vice president is scientifically illiterate or has deliberately ignored the discoveries made by genuine scientists about  COVID-19 since it claimed its first U.S. victim in February.
 

The most risible manifestation of Biden’s imposture concerning COVID-19 involves his science-free claims that mask mandates will somehow ameliorate transmission of the virus. He recently told a group of Michigan supporters, “Wearing a mask is not only going to protect you, but it also protects those around you.” This nonsense has been repeatedly debunked by randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies. No RCT study with a verified outcome — not one — has shown that masks prevent the spread of respiratory influenza-like illnesses (both influenza and COVID-19 spread via droplet and aerosol transmission). The ineffectiveness of masks has been confirmed by a meta-analysis that can be found at the official website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):

In our systematic review, we identified 10 RCTs that reported estimates of the effectiveness of face masks in reducing laboratory-confirmed influenza virus infections in the community.… There is limited evidence for their effectiveness in preventing influenza virus transmission either when worn by the infected person for source control or when worn by uninfected persons to reduce exposure. Our systematic review found no significant effect of face masks on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.