Displaying posts published in

March 2021

Biden’s Lie-Filled Press Conference He called on “correspondents” too deferential to challenge him. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/bidens-lie-filled-press-conference-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden’s March 25th press conference was his first since taking office. He lied so often during the hour or so he spoke and fielded questions that even the New York Times had to take notice.

“We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming,” Biden claimed, referring to families of migrants illegally crossing or seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

“False,” declared the New York Times. “Federal officials recorded about 19,000 encounters with families at the southwestern border in February. Of those, about 7,900 families, or 42 percent, were expelled, far short of a majority.” The Times also cited an Axios report that the expulsion rate was 13 percent during the previous week.

Biden claimed that former President Donald Trump eliminated the funding for aid to the Central American countries that Biden had helped put together as the Obama administration’s vice president. The purpose of the aid, Biden said, was to get at the root causes of why migrants were leaving those countries. “What did Trump do? He eliminated that funding,” Biden said. “He didn’t use it.”

“False,” declared the New York Times again. “President Donald J.Trump did not completely eliminate the aid that Mr. Biden cited,” the New York Times explained. The Times’ fact-checker pointed out that aid to Central America was set by Congress at $505.9 million in the 2021 fiscal year (which began during Trump’s term) and that the aid that Trump temporarily suspended in April 2019 was restored in October 2019.

The New York Times also said that Biden had “exaggerated” when he claimed that Trump had “shut down the number of beds available.” Calling this an exaggeration was too kind. Biden was lying once again. The Times’ fact-checker noted that the monthly bed capacity grew to over 16,000 by December 2018, and that by Trump’s “last full month in office, in December 2020, monthly bed capacity was more than 13,000.” There were some reductions during the pandemic to comply with coronavirus protocols while Trump was in office – health precautions that the Biden administration is throwing to the wind as it tries to cope with the huge surge of illegal unaccompanied minors that its open border policy has invited.

The Bipartisan Senate Bill You Haven’t Heard About By Bill Scher

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/29/the_bipartisan_senate_bill_you_havent_heard_about_145490.html

Two weeks ago, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin told his colleagues in a floor speech, “It’s time to change the Senate rules and stop holding this Senate hostage.”

Last Thursday, the Senate voted on a bill to push back the application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program — the low-interest loan program helping small businesses survive the pandemic — from March 31 to May 31. The bill passed 92-7, and is headed to President Biden’s desk.

If the Senate were actually being held hostage, this measure would not have passed. Admittedly, the bill does not qualify as sweeping legislation. Its passage does not immediately pave the way for the Democrats’ ambitious legislative proposals such as expanding voting rights, investing trillions in infrastructure, addressing climate change, raising the minimum wage or establishing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers.

But the PPP extension is more than naming a post office. With the loan program scheduled to expire on Wednesday, blocking an extension would have left 190,000 businesses with pending applications in the cold.

Study: Media Reported Only Bad COVID News (Until Trump Lost)

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/29/report-media-reported-only-bad-covid-news-until-trump-lost/

A study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research finds that coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic by the domestic press was overwhelmingly negative. More negative than the international press. More negative than the local press. And more negative than the science. But then a funny thing happened after President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.

Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University did a content analysis of tens of thousands of COVID-19 news stories to look at the levels of negativity. What they found was that 87% of the stories published by the top 15 news sources in the country were negative in tone. That compares with 50% of international news sources, and 64% for scientific journals. They also found the mainstream media were 25 percentage points more likely to be negative than more general U.S news sources.

What’s more, this overwhelming negativity included even “areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.” And, the researchers determined, the mainstream media coverage was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.”

In other words, the national press in the U.S. was putting a negative spin on everything COVID-related. (The study is titled “Why Is All COVID News Bad News?”)

Those 14 top news sources tracked by the researchers, by the way, included only two that might be considered conservative – Fox News and the New York Post.

Piles of People: New Photos Show What Biden Is Trying to Hide at the Border Katie Pavlich

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/03/26/piles-of-people-cruz-releases-photos-from-inside-border-facilities-n2586972

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has released new and never seen before photos from inside an overcrowded Customs and Border Protection facility in Donna, Texas. These are the types of facilities the Biden administration has banned media from entering or touring. 

Watch Out for a Vaccine Patent Heist The left wants Biden to force drug companies to give away their IP.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-for-a-vaccine-patent-heist-11616959785?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Pharmaceutical companies have come to the world’s rescue with Covid-19 vaccines, but these days no good deed by business goes unpunished. The Biden Administration is now under pressure to support a political campaign to break vaccine patents.

India and South Africa last fall petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid vaccines and treatments, which they say is necessary to expand global access. Fifty-five other countries plus an army of nonprofiits and labor unions have joined the attempted heist.

“Multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies,” Bernie Sanders says. Adds Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro : “We need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first.”

***Patent-breakers are presenting a false choice between protecting intellectual property and public health. Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

‘Minds Wide Shut’ Review: Dogma, Division and Distrust Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration?By Michael S. Roth

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minds-wide-shut-review-dogma-division-and-distrust-11616795028?mod=opinion_major_pos12

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us” is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own.

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of their lives on university campuses, and they know that things ain’t like they used to be. Their works return us to well-trodden paths of moderation and conversation, bidding us stay back from the slippery slopes that lead to dangerous dogmatisms. In this volume, literature professors are frequently taken to task, either for not realizing the greatness of the books they are privileged to teach or because they aim for moral purity and theoretical certainty.

Minds Wide Shut

By Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro
Princeton, 307 pages, $29.95

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are worried not only about the fate of parochial academic disciplines; they are concerned about the development of a culture that undermines the possibility of democratic disagreement. “We need to cultivate the skills of self-questioning, recognizing our own limitations, and attentive listening to those who differ,” they write, “all of which are necessary for respectful, productive dialogue.” The authors claim that too many faculty, students and citizens today believe in theories or take moral stances that claim to provide complete certainty about a vast domain of human experience. This commitment creates new fundamentalisms, making open-minded learning all but impossible. The fundamentalist spirit eliminates the consideration of important questions because it doesn’t tolerate the possibility that in some matters ambiguity or partial answers are the best we can do. Certainty shuts one’s mind.