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December 2020

This Tennessee Data for Masked vs. Unmasked Counties Would Be on Every Front Page, if Results Were Different Scott Morefield

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2020/12/28/this-data-for-masked-vs-unmasked-counties-would-be-on-every-front-page-if-it-sho-n2582176

As you may have heard, we’ve sort of got a “casedemic” problem here in Tennessee. That means lots and lots (and lots) of people are testing positive for COVID-19. That’s about all we know for sure, of course. Nevertheless, hand-wringing from media, politicians, and local ‘health authorities’ is seemingly neverending, as are local reporters in my neck of the woods being filmed standing in front of that FEMA body truck they don’t bother to tell us has been sitting in front of the regional hospital, unused, SINCE MARCH. Hospitals aren’t overwhelmed by any measure, and even the death toll isn’t really all that impressive either considering that Tennessee is actually below the national average in deaths per million and most people who are dying are either already super old or super sick.

Indeed, while COVID does tragically hit some people hard, most ‘cases’ are quite mild and often non-symptomatic, driven by panic at every sniffle or people being forced to test for work and other reasons. And there is increasingly solid evidence that not everyone counted as a ‘COVID death’ is really a death caused by COVID, but rather someone who had a positive PCR test at some point in 2020 before dying. When you have a highly contagious respiratory virus going around, particularly one that is seasonal and seems to be boxing out the flu, an increasing percentage of those who die will likely have it. These ‘scary’ numbers lie at the root of the ongoing panic and give continued justification for our overlords to continue to exercise control over society.

Here in Tennessee, one of the few states without a statewide mask-mandate, much pressure has been placed upon Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee to “do something.” Since lockdowns are thankfully for the most part out of the question here, the pressure has centered on establishing that mandate the mask-Karens have been longing for. Even former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a medical doctor, has gotten in on the action, begging Lee to pull the trigger in a Facebook post earlier this month that blamed rising case numbers not on the winter months when such viruses always tend to spread, but on supposedly unmasked rural counties.

There Is No Mercy and No Redemption in Today’s Cancel Culture Michael Brown

https://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbrown/2020/12/28/there-is-no-mercy-and-no-redemption-in-todays-cancel-culture-n2582205

It is one thing when, as an adult, you are held accountable for the life you choose to live, especially if you are unrepentant. It is another thing when, as a young adult, you are severely penalized for a three-second video posted on social media when you were just 15.

But that is exactly what happened to Mimi Groves.

She was a championship-winning cheerleader in high school and was accepted by the University of Tennessee, her dream school. She was also accepted by their cheerleading squad, which was one of the top squads in the nation.

Now 18 years old, she was excited to start living out her college dream. And that’s when the cancel culture struck.

When Mimi was 15, she posted a three-second video on Snapchat while she sat in her car in traffic, saying, “I can drive, n*****s.” That was it.

Three years later, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd in June of this year, and while a senior in high school, she posted something very different.

Using her Instagram account, she encouraged people to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, and do something” to help support the Black Lives Matter movement.

So, whatever her intent was when she was 15, her intent now was clear. She was saying that racial justice was important and that she would stand with the American Black community. Good for her.

But that is not how the cancel culture thinks. It does not understand the concepts of mercy and redemption. Instead, it is ruthless and unforgiving.

Matt Vespa With Congress Killing American Business, One Media Company That Liberals Hate Took Action

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2020/12/28/barstool-emergency-relief-fund-n2582198

Congress has failed. That’s not hard task for the idiots we have working on the Hill. Dare I say, democracy has failed, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole. As the nation deals with the coronavirus outbreak, thousands of businesses have been destroyed, specifically bars and restaurants. Initially, I get why there was a stay-at-home order, now there are raw numbers that show these establishments are not the main source of spread. In New York, one of the states hardest hit by the virus, new data shows that bars and restaurants account for only 1.4 percent of COVID spread. Also, schools are not sources of so-called “super spread.” Reopen the damn schools and resume indoor dining. 

For months, businesses have needed aid. Families have needed assistance. Unfortunately, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats had other plans. You see they knew COVID relief packages helped Trump. They wanted him gone, so they admitted to nuking past negotiations in order to better the chances of Joe Biden winning the election. And now, after months of economic disruption and bills stacking as high as Everest, they’re going to give struggling families $600. My eyes cannot roll hard enough.

Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports, a media company that liberals hate for all the obvious and idiotic reasons, decided to do more than Congress has done in months to help Americans save their dream. His rants on social media about how politicians are trying to kill our right to earn a living are must-watch material. I think even the most ardent Trump hater would agree that if Americans were given a choice of getting COVID or seeing their businesses destroyed because of a virus that has a 90+ percent recovery rate, I think you know that most, if not everyone, would pick the former. Anyways, Barstool has established a relief fund that’s probably going to raise close to $10 million helping businesses have a few more weeks of oxygen, which is more than Congress is doing right now (via Fox Business):

Dave Portnoy, founder of media company Barstool Sports, has raised $ 6.3 million for 18 small businesses as of Saturday morning.

University Of Michigan IT Department Wants People To Stop Saying ‘Picnic,’ ‘Preferred Pronouns,’ And ‘Girl’ December 28, 2020 By Paulina Enck

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/28/university-of-michigan-it-department-wants-people-to-stop-saying-picnic-preferred-pronouns-and-girl/

The University of Michigan’s technology department is doing the important work of protecting students from the horrors of words like “picnic,” “girl,” “man,” “preferred pronouns,” and “honey,” even though the real horror would be finding these offensive. The list, created by the “Words Matter Task Force,” details words and phrases deemed anathema to an “inclusive” work and academic environment, offering awkward or non-specific replacements.

The strangest inclusion on the list would have to be “picnic,” which finds itself on the chopping block due to a false story about its origin. Rumors spread across social media contending that the word “picnic” developed in the context of lynching black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, but these claims have been debunked.

The word actually derives from the French “pique-nique,” which was coined in the 17th century to describe people coming together to eat as a group, with participants responsible for bringing different food. The university thus wishes to censor language based on an internet hoax.

Likewise, the common expression “long time no see” is derided for potentially being derogatory towards people from Asian descent. Or Native Americans. No one is quite sure. Due to the ubiquity of the phrase, it is virtually impossible to trace its origins, but it likely arose as a direct translation from Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, or a Native American dialect. Yet the leap from “may have started from direct translations from an undetermined language” to “harmful and exclusionary” is vast.

DIANE BEDERMAN: WHAT I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT COVID CURE FROM THE MEDICAL EXPERTS AND POLITICIANS

https://dianebederman.com/what-i-have-learned-about-the-covid-cure-from-the-medical-experts-and-politicians/

For those of you who follow me on my blog, you know I have been following and writing about Covid 19, the Chinese Virus, since March 2020.

I have read as many expert opinions as I could find, and that has been problematic as Twitter and Facebook have refused to post anything that goes against Dr. Anthony Fauci. I listened to the lectures given on a regular basis by our self-anointed “essential” public health experts and politicians.

Based on their actions, it seems to me that the powers-that-be have concluded that the only way to crush Covid 19, the Chinese Virus, is to crush all small businesses and all the people associated with them.

I also learned that if you protest for BLM or Antifa you will not get Covid. If you go to any house of worship, you will. If you wear a mask in Walmart, Costco or any big box store that sells items from China you will not get Covid. I know this because the medical experts and politicians have kept these stores open with hundreds of shoppers, whenever the hospitals are overflowing and the ICU’s are full and the numbers of Covid cases go up too fast ( I am not sure what “too fast” means). On the other hand these leaders are quick to lock down our local small businesses because they know small businesses are super-spreaders and one is sure to catch Covid, even when wearing a mask and using hand sanitizer at the hairdresser, the toy store, the book shop, barbershop, the esthetician, the bike store, the clothing store… And coffee shops and restaurants? Too dangerous. They must be shut down.

Except they are not. But, one does not want to contradict the prevailing fear-mongering of our leaders and media or one will be censored and canceled.

Soviet-Style Media Propaganda in America Jeffrey Lord

www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2020/12/26/soviet-style-media-propaganda-america

Over there in The Wall Street Journal as we travel through the Christmas holiday season, was this very perceptive piece by one David Satter. Mr. Satter is identified as the “author of Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union and a member of the academic advisory board of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.”

At one stage in his earlier life he was the Moscow correspondent for The Financial Times of London, arriving in the Soviet capital in 1976. He went on to work for The Wall Street Journal as a special correspondent covering Soviet affairs. Suffice to say, he knows well how a state-run media runs.

Among other things in his WSJ article Satter says this: 

“One of the pillars of the Soviet Union was a controlled press in which all coverage was organized to confirm a mendacious ideology.

…Soviet practices would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. media. But in August 2016, Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for the New York Times, wrote that if journalists believed that Mr. Trump was a “demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies,” it was necessary to “throw out the textbook of American journalism.” The Times started to characterize Mr. Trump’s statements as “lies” in news stories and suppress news that worked to Mr. Trump’s advantage, such as the Hunter Biden story this fall.”

Satter’s reference to the 2016 story by The Times’ Jim Rutenberg is indeed worth recalling. Here is an excerpt from that column: 

“If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.”

Wisconsin Lawmakers Join Lawsuit to Block Certification of Presidential Electors By Tom Ozimek

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/wisconsin-lawmakers-join-lawsuit-to-block-certification-of-presidential-electors_3632577.html

 
Two Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin have joined a federal lawsuit that seeks to block the counting of Electoral College votes from several contested states when Congress meets in a joint session on Jan. 6.
Wisconsin state Reps. Jeff Mursau and David Steffen signed onto a suit filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society and the Wisconsin Voters Alliance, among others. Also included in the list of plaintiffs are two GOP members of the Michigan House, Reps. Matt Maddock and Daire Rendon, according to the complaint.

Attorney Erick Kaardal of the Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society argued in the complaint that the state legislatures of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona were prevented from exercising their power under the U.S. Constitution to certify the presidential electors’ votes cast on Dec. 14.

“State legislative post-election certifications of Presidential votes and of Presidential electors are part of constitutionally-protected voting rights,” Kaardal wrote. “Everyone who votes—distinguishable from those who don’t—have a constitutionally-protected interest in state legislative post-election certification of Presidential electors. The Defendants violate those voting rights by counting ballots of Presidential electors without the constitutionally-required state legislative post-election certification.”

Beware: New Civics Mandates Will Be Woke By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/beware-new-civics-mandates-will-be-woke/

Americans dismayed by the mendacity and distortions of the 1619 Project are headed for a fall. A commendable desire to counter both civic illiteracy and the excesses of woke ideology has produced a new national movement to mandate history and civics standards. Unfortunately, that strategy will produce the very opposite of its intended effect. Far from restoring traditional understandings of American citizenship, the proposed history and civics mandates will entrench woke ideology nationally, imposing it on the reddest of red-state school-districts, and ultimately on private and religious schools as well.

The conservative-leaning American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is considering a model bill that would have state legislatures mandate history and civics standards. Bipartisan federal legislation to fund curriculum development and teacher training in civics has also been introduced. Comprehensive proposals to create de facto national history and civics standards on the model of Common Core are in the works as well, and likely to be adopted by a Biden administration. Every one of these initiatives will undermine the very ends they appear to promote. Conservative legislators who support them will one day find themselves facing an army of angry constituents. The blowback against these ill-considered civics mandates will make the battle over Common Core look like patty-cake. By then, unfortunately, the damage will have been done.

Sound implausible? It shouldn’t, because it’s happened before. The National History Standards fiasco of the early 1990s chillingly prefigures the trap into which traditionalists are about to tumble. Back then, America was in the early stages of our education culture war. The overthrow of Stanford’s Western Civilization requirement in 1988 had launched the newly dubbed movement for “multiculturalism,” which in turn provoked a counter-attack on what would soon be called “political correctness.”

Here’s What New York Democrat Party Boss Thinks of an AOC Primary Challenge Against Chuck Schumer

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/12/26/new-york-democratic-party-boss-had-this-to-say-to-aoc-about-primarying-chuck-schumer-n2582152

Jay Jacobs, chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, made it clear where he stands when it comes to rumors of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) preparing a primary challenge against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). 

“I think it would be a primary driven by ambition more than by need,” Jacobs told the New York Post.

Rumors have circulated for months that AOC will attempt to unseat Sen. Schumer in 2022, but Jacobs told The Post that such a primary challenge between Ocasio-Cortez and Schumer would be a loss in more ways than one. 

“Chuck Schumer has been a progressive force in the state for decades,” said the Democratic chairman. “She has a constituency that admires her and supports her, and they’re in her community, and I think it would be a loss for them if she were to do that.”

And Ocasio-Cortez would “absolutely” lose her challenge against Schumer, warned Jacobs, while admitting that he has never met the young lawmaker. 

“We’ve never met. I would look forward to doing that,” Jacobs added. “I am open to that at any time.”

In an interview earlier this year, AOC said she was focused on winning her re-election this past November but then setting her sights on higher office. 

The intimidation of Mellissa Carone By John Dietrich

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/the_intimidation_of_mellissa_carone.html

Dominion Voting Systems is presently going on attack.  Attorneys Thomas Clare and Megan Meier, representing Dominion, sent letters to President Donald Trump’s supporters demanding that the cease making false and “defamatory” claims about the company’s role in voter fraud.  Their letter to Mellissa Carone, dated 22 December 2020, has been posted on the internet.  The letter reveals that Dominion may not be competently represented.  The attorneys claim that Carone was Giuliani’s “star witness” who made outlandish accusations “without a shred of corroborating evidence.” Who designated Mellissa Carone a “star witness”?  Giuliani had several witnesses.

The attorneys claim that Carone was “hired through a staffing agency for one day to clean glass on machines and complete other menial tasks.”  She was simply a cleaning lady.  John Poulos, Dominion CEO, testified that her role was “really limited to a type one type of technician who provides — she would have been told how to clean the glass read heads or at least she should have been.”  Poulos concedes that Carone was a “technician” but still minimized her role.  Wikibious describes her as a “contracted IT worker who was responsible for fixing malfunctioning vote-counting machines at Michigan’s TCF Center.”

Carone is warned of possible litigation.  “Litigation regarding these issues is imminent.”  They present her with a list of demands that would require a full-time staff to meet.  She has to “preserve all documents relating to such claims,” including “any and all communications she may have had with Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and any other member of the Trump campaign.” They also demanded “preservation of records for every person who has compensated her—or any entity related to her—for making public statements about Dominion.”  

The demand for various documents is nearly 400 words long.  They then inform her that, “The laws and rules prohibiting destruction of evidence apply to electronically stored information in the same manner that they apply to other evidence.”  The laws are spelled out clearly in 18 U.S. Code§ 1519.  The only problem is that this statute deals with Federal litigation.  Clare and Meier have not even begun their court case.  Perhaps they believe Carone will not be advised by several attorneys that they have no authority.  They are simply trying to intimidate her.