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April 2021

POLITICS Comments turned off

Manchin Delivers a Massive Blow to Biden’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Reagan McCarthy

By on April 5th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/04/05/manchin-n2587410

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) delivered a blow to President Biden’s “infrastructure” plan, which is already facing a steep challenge in the Senate. Manchin said publicly that he opposes an increase in the corporate tax rate, to 28 percent, that is included in the plan proposed by the administration. 

The “swing vote” Democrat lawmaker said that the increase was a non-starter for him.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is considering using budget reconciliation to pass the hefty infrastructure plan, in order to sidestep the 60-vote threshold, as Democrats did to pass the American Rescue Plan earlier this year. If Schumer took this route, only 51 votes would be necessary to pass the plan. Manchin warned the administration that he is not alone in opposing such a steep increase to the corporate tax rate.

“There’s six or seven other Democrats who feel very strongly about this. We have to be competitive, and we’re not going to throw caution to the wind,” he continued in the interview.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that the administration’s infrastructure plan mandates that corporations pay their “fair share” of taxes.

Like other plans put forth by the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats, the infrastructure plan is receiving blowback from Republican lawmakers for inclusion of line-items that are completely unrelated to infrastructure.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Watch How 60 Minutes Deceptively Edited Ron DeSantis’s Full Answer on Publix Vaccinations By Zachary Evans

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/watch-how-60-minutes-deceptively-edited-ron-desantiss-full-answer-on-publix-vaccinations/

CBS’s 60 Minutes alleged that Florida governor Ron DeSantis enlisted grocery chain Publix to help with coronavirus vaccine distribution because of a campaign contribution, but edited DeSantis’s full response to the allegation.

“Publix, as you know, donated $100,000 to your campaign, and then you rewarded them with exclusive rights to vaccination in Palm Beach,” a CBS reporter said at a press conference for the governor in Orlando. DeSantis said the reporter peddled a “fake narrative” when she alleged he engaged in a “pay-for-play” scheme.

However, 60 Minutes omitted a key section of DeSantis’s response, in which he states that the first pharmacies to take charge of vaccine distribution were CVS and Walgreens, and were initially tasked with vaccinating residents of long-term care facilities.

DeSantis said that in January the state wanted to expand distribution sites and contacted other large chains with pharmacies.

“You had the counties, you had some drive-thru sites, you had hospitals that were doing a lot, but we wanted to get it into communities more,” DeSantis said. “So we reached out to other retail pharmacies: Publix, Walmart, obviously CVS and Walgreens had to finish that mission and we said we’re going to use you as soon as you’re done with that.”

DeSantis has grown in popularity among GOP voters, who view the governor as a potential presidential candidate in 2024 if President Trump decides not to run again.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Debunking the COVID Vaccine Doomsayers . By Marilyn Quigley

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2021/04/05/debunking_the_covid_vaccine_doomsayers_771222.html

It’s hard to ignore the wave of anti-vaccine videos circulating on social media. Curiosity makes us click, and we watch yet another doctor’s emphatic advice—“Do not take the COVID-19 vaccine if you value your life!” They all speak with the confidence and authority of spies planted last year in the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson labs. Now these self-proclaimed experts—some with acceptable medical backgrounds, but others more questionable—have become whistleblowers predicting horrific outcomes from the vaccines. They look into our eyes and claim to care deeply about our health, urging, “Pass my video on to everyone you know as fast as you can.”

Having viewed several, I asked myself, “Can I find the truth?” My hands-on science training consists of dissecting and drawing a frog in tenth grade. But I can dissect long sentences and draw conclusions, use a dictionary, and apply critical thinking with logic. 

So I intensively researched respected sources and found most of the doomsayer doctors’ assertions to be wrong. Here’s what my homework found. (Note: some names are changed but the claims are reproduced accurately.)

“Dr. Whistle Blower” insists the new medication is not a “real” vaccine because it does not fit the CDC’s own definition: “A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” The meaning of immunity is the hangup for him.

Dr. Blower wrongly limits his definition of a “real,” immunizing vaccine to the sterilizing type, which kills the pathogen on contact and establishes immunity by preventing any disease from entering the body. This “gold standard” has not been achieved for many diseases which, nevertheless, are no longer a threat, thanks to vaccines.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academic Freedom Alliance On a new initiative to protect freedom of expression on college campuses.

By on April 5th, 2021

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/4/academic-freedom-alliance

Booker T. Washington would have liked the Academic Freedom Alliance, a newly announced group of college faculty dedicated to protecting freedom of expression on campus. The group, conceived at Princeton last summer, has quickly scaled up into a nationwide network. Although one of its main founders is Robert P. George, himself a conservative professor at Princeton, the alliance is determinedly nonpartisan and includes liberals and progressives as well as conservatives. The actions of the intolerant mob threaten everyone, regardless of political coloration. As a tribe, academics are not conspicuous for their courage. They tend to look the other way when colleagues are attacked for expressing opinions that do not pass muster with the wardens of wokeness. The afa hopes to change that, encouraging its members to act like elephants, not zebras: when hunted by lions, George noted in an interview, herds of zebras “fly off in a million directions, and the targeted member is easily taken down and destroyed and eaten.” Elephants, he said, behave differently. They “circle around the vulnerable elephant” and protect it. Academics need to do likewise and offer support—legal as well as moral—when one of their numbers falls victim to the mob.

We welcome the Academic Freedom Alliance. Like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), it may well become a beacon of sanity in the stultifying and tenebrous atmosphere that prevails in American academia today. You can find out more about the alliance, and donate to support its activities, at its website, academicfreedom.org.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Crony capitalism and professional sports by James Piereson

By on April 5th, 2021

https://newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/crony-capitalism-and-professional-sports

On public funding for professional athletic arenas.

Professional athletic leagues have traditionally steered clear of politics in order to emphasize the purity of their entertainment and to avoid dividing fans over partisan controversies. That has changed in the last year. Players in the National Football League have “taken the knee” during playing of the national anthem as a protest against police practices; the National Basketball Association has embraced Black Lives Matter, also as a protest against the police; and now Major League Baseball has taken this year’s All-Star game out of Atlanta as a protest against Georgia’s new voting law, though baseball executives do not appear to have studied that law. Through these gestures, formerly non-political organizations have allied themselves with explicitly political causes.

These steps are unusual and unprecedented. Business corporations generally prefer to serve inclusive markets while avoiding controversies that might divide customers for or against them. The new corporate alliance with liberals and the Democratic Party is not only new – it is also dangerous. It will politicize the country along new lines, introduce political controversies into the internal operations of corporations, encourage boycotts and assaults on all sides, and much more. Some of this is already happening. As a strategy for dividing America, this one would be hard to beat.

Professional sports leagues, while mostly operating as for-profit enterprises, nevertheless receive generous subsidies from federal, state, and local sources to build and maintain modern stadiums and arenas. Importantly, these subsidies assume that the enterprises are non-political and non-partisan in nature, otherwise they would not be granted. Are professional sports franchises violating the bargains they made with taxpayers and public authorities?

Up until the 1950s, professional stadiums were constructed with private funds provided by owners. Fenway Park in Boston was built in 1913 by the franchise itself, as was Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (1913), Yankee Stadium in New York (1923), Wrigley Field in Chicago (1913), and nearly every other professional ballpark and stadium built in that era. Many professional football franchises leased these stadiums to stage their games. It did not occur to the owners that the public might pay for their facilities. That mindset disappeared in the 1950s when owners began to ask cities and states to pay for their stadiums.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

HUGE DEVELOPMENT: Hand Recount Finds Dominion Owned Voting Machines Shorted EVERY REPUBLICAN Candidate in Windham, New Hampshire, 300 Votes! Jim Hoft

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/huge-development-hand-recount-finds-dominion-voting-machines-shorted-every-republican-windham-new-hampshire-300-votes/

Here we go.
More proof of election fraud by Dominion Voting Machines.

A recent hand recount in the Rockingham District 7 NH House Race in Windham, New Hampshire, found that the Dominion-owned voting machines shorted EVERY REPUBLICAN by roughly 300 votes.

Via Facebook

The Dominion machine counted results were wrong for all 4 Republicans by almost exactly 300 votes.

Granite Grok reported:

The Town of Windham used Dominion machines to count paper ballots and upon a believable hand recount, it was confirmed each Republican was machine-cheated out of roughly 300 votes.

You would think this would have been solved by the Dominion machine company, the Secretary of State, the Elections Unit of the AG’s Office, or the laughable Ballot Law Commission. (Kathy Sullivan, d (Term expires July 1, 2024)

Nope.

Just like every other state that used machines that alter ballot counts in favor of one political party over another – here we are.

Dominion Voting Systems owns the intellectual property of the AccuVote machines used in New Hampshire.

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KRD NEWS Comments turned off

AMERICA’S TRUE BELIEVERS AND THEIR GUTLESS ENABLERS BY PETER SAVODNIK

By on April 5th, 2021

ttps://mailchi.mp/59ad38187d03/krd-news-americas-true-believers-and-their-gutles

The mountain of witches is piling up. At the top of the heap is Sharon Osbourne, the Captain Underpants guy, the Bachelor host, or whatever C-list celebrity failed to condemn “Gone with the Wind” on Instagram with sufficient fervor. But by the time you read this they’ll surely be eclipsed by another faux-outrage pieced together by the microaggression-hunters poring over old text messages or yellowing screen-shots of Halloween parties past.

Most of these disappearances won’t matter much, because the disappeared are already known. Even if their contract isn’t renewed or their agent indignantly — and very publicly — cuts ties with them, they’ll be fine. They’ll resurface.

The people who won’t are the countless, less visible who have lost jobs, lost businesses, lost reputations, lost friends. The schlubs. The cautionary tales. Those who have been cautioned, made to comply, squeezed into the Procrustean Bed of identitarian absolutism.

We know who’s to blame for this surreality: the True Believers. The children of Park Slope and Echo Park with their graphic tattoos and nut allergies and an odd inability to form complete sentences. The neurotic, anxious twentysomethings who went to college to be told that “truth” is a white male construct, who seem devoid of poetry or irony, who believe mean words, words with which they disagree, are like ICBMs. Those whose lives are circumscribed by galactic reservoirs of ignorance — about the past, the culture, themselves, about why they believe what they know to be good and indisputable. Those who know only how to perform, and who rely on acronyms and slogans and logical fallacies when asked: how can you be sure of that?

But children are children. They can only be blamed so much. 

The real wrongdoers are the Enablers. The so-called adults. The tech founders and college presidents and newspaper editors and museum directors and bank CEOs who pretend that the fight for “justice” is just. Who pretend that the “equity” crusade is about fairness and not about defending the grotesque inequality between those who have been trained to think correctly and those who have not.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Beijing Accelerating Timeline for Possible Invasion of Taiwan, Expert Warns By Frank Fang

By on April 5th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/beijing-accelerating-timeline-for-possible-invasion-of-taiwan-expert-

TAIPEI, Taiwan—The Chinese communist regime is accelerating its plans to invade Taiwan, an expert warns, as Beijing ratchets up military maneuvers against the island.

Twenty Chinese military aircraft—including four nuclear-capable H-6K bombers, 10 J-16 fighter jets, two Y-8 anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and a KJ-500 airborne early warning and control aircraft—entered Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on March 26, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense. It was the largest incursion ever reported by the ministry.

Taiwan’s ADIZ, located adjacent to the island’s territorial airspace, is an area where incoming planes must identify themselves to the island’s air traffic controller.

The incursion caps off a significant increase in hostility by Beijing against Taiwan since 2020. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, re-elected last January, has taken a hard line against threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while the island has deepened its cooperation with the United States—prompting the regime to escalate its warmongering towards the island.

The CCP sees Taiwan as a part of its territory and has threatened war to bring the island under its fold. The self-ruled island is in reality a de-facto independent country with its own democratically-elected government, military, constitution, and currency.

The Republic of China (ROC)—Taiwan’s official name—overthrew China’s Qing Dynasty emperor in 1911. After the ROC retreated to Taiwan upon being defeated by the CCP during the Chinese Civil War, the CCP established a communist state called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, while Taiwan gradually transitioned to become a democracy. But to this day, the Chinese regime has refused to recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty.

Last year, the Chinese air force flew about 380 sorties into Taiwan’s ADIZ, the highest number in a given year since 1996. So far this year, the Chinese military has been sending aircraft into the ADIZ on a near-daily basis.

The island’s coast guard on April 1 announced that Beijing has been flying unmanned drones near Taiwan’s Dongsha Island, located in the northern part of the South China Sea. The authority said it could not rule out that Beijing was using the drones to carry out reconnaissance.

Alongside military actions, the regime has sharpened its rhetoric towards the island. Earlier this year, a Chinese defense spokesperson threatened war against Taiwan if it declared independence.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jordan’s Volatility Alerts the USA to Middle East Reality Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on April 5th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3sSvn1O  Jordan’s domestic vulnerability

Jordan’s domestic upheaval involved some Arab countries, members of the royal Jordanian family and other prominent Bedouins, who were arrested and charged with an attempted regime change.

A regime-change in Jordan could transform the strategically-located country – between Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel – into another haven for Palestinian and Islamic terrorism. It would threaten the existence of the current regimes in Saudi Arabia, all other pro-US Gulf states and Egypt, advancing the interests of Iran’s Ayatollahs, Turkey’s Erdogan, the Muslim Brotherhood, China and Russia, while traumatizing regional stability and with dire Western and Israeli national security and economic consequences.  

Jordan’s inherent political and ideological vulnerability has been fueled by intra-Bedouin fragmentation and conflicts, dating back to 1921, when the Hashemite Bedouin family was imported to Jordan – from Hejaz in western Saudi Arabia – by the British Empire, and imposed upon the indigenous Bedouins of (mostly southern) Jordan.  Furthermore, Jordan’s Bedouins are deeply divided, geographically, tribally, culturally, ideologically and religiously, with some of the southern tribes considering the Hashemites “carpetbaggers” from the Arabian Peninsula, Westernized and straying away from Islam and pan-Arabism by concluding a peace treaty with the “infidel” Jewish State.

Moreover, 70% of Jordan’s population are Palestinians, while Palestinian leaders (e.g., the PLO, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas) view Jordan as an artificial entity, the eastern (78%) part of Palestine. Hence, Palestinian active involvement in subversion and terrorism in Jordan and occasional attempts to topple the Hashemite regime, such as the civil war in September 1970 and the 1989 wave of terrorism.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The totalitarians’ Covid con unintentionally explained by CNN public health ‘expert’ Thomas LIfson

By on April 5th, 2021

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/the_totalitarians_covid_con_unintentionally_explained_by_cnn_public_health_expert.html

Too much freedom is a bad thing because it limits the ability of the state to coerce its subjects (“citizens” seems almost archaic as the Great Reset looms) into behavior they otherwise would resist. That’s the basic message explained to Chris Cuomo by a professor of public health policy that CNN favors with its airtime.

We lost an incredible amount of the freedom we formerly took for granted when Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China, and was greeted by world leaders as a pandemic justifying the radical curtailment of liberty and enhancement of their own power. Now, they and their lackeys in the academic and medical establishment see the restoration of those liberties as a threat. George Washington University Public Health Policy Professor Laura Wen said it out loud – a classic Kinsley gaffe of accidentally telling the truth about something that politicians would rather the public not understand. A lot of people noticed, including Ace of Spades, Legal Insurrection, and Instapundit. This tweet with 38 seconds of video has gotten almost 4 million views: WATCH HERE.  :

It’s clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket to pre-pandemic life….and the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning, Chris, about how all these states were reopening. They are reopening at 100 percent….and we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status.

Because, otherwise, if everything is reopen, then what’s the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that’s why I think the CDC and the Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, “If you’re vaccinated, you can do all these things…here’s all these freedoms that you have.” Because, otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy those freedoms anyway.” [emphasis added]

You can’t have people enjoying freedoms before the government forces them all to take a experimental drugs, some of which act on their genetic makeup. One that has caused severe reactions in some, including a number of deaths.

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