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Ruth King

A Recap Of The Democratic National Convention’s Most Insane Moments By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/21/a-recap-of-the-democratic-national-conventions-most-insane-moments/

Democrats wrapped up their party convention Thursday night having officially coronated former Vice President Joe Biden as their 2020 presidential nominee with California Sen. Kamala Harris riding on the ticket months after she ambushed Biden as a racist.

After nominating the farthest-left presidential ticket in history with a more than $10 trillion platform spearheading the left’s 21st-century woke revolution, Democrats have 74 days to make their case to the nation before judgment day on Nov. 3.

If the last four days featuring eight hours of an “Orange Man Bad” infomercial in prime time were any preview of the campaign ahead, Democrats are pinning their message on pursuing the total transformation of American society into an exhaustively woke socialist utopia with a faux-moderate Biden as their Trojan horse.

The DNC was a circus, but a boring one at that. While the four nights of prime-time coverage featured Bill Clinton as the party’s moral compass, John Kerry as a legendary Middle East peacemaker, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo as a coronavirus miracle worker, the convention still operated on a full-day calendar streaming live panels of party activists speaking with prominent politicians.

Here’s a rundown of some of this week’s most notable moments that legacy media won’t cover.

Hydroxychloroquine: A Morality Tale A startling investigation into how a cheap, well-known drug became a political football in the midst of a pandemic by Norman Doidge

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/hydroxychloroquine-morality-tal

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, a survey of the world’s frontline physicians showed hydroxychloroquine to be the drug they considered the most effective at treating COVID-19 patients. That was in early April, shortly after a French study showed it was safe and effective in lowering the virus count, at times in combination with azithromycin. Next we were told hydroxychloroquine was likely ineffective, and also dangerous, and that that French study was flawed and the scientist behind it worthy of mockery. More studies followed, with contradictory results, and then out came what was hailed by some as a definitive study of 96,000 patients showing the drug was most certainly dangerous and ineffective, and indeed that it killed 30% more people than those who didn’t take it. Within days, that study was retracted, with the editor of one of the two most respected medical journals in the Western world conceding it was “a monumental fraud.” And on it went.     READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AT SITE

The Long, Sad Saga of Hydroxychloroquine By Jim Talent

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-long-sad-saga-of-hydroxychloroquine/

The same medical community which is telling us that HCQ is dangerous, may soon be telling us that a vaccine developed in record time is completely safe.

I want to make sure NR readers don’t miss this essay from Norman Doidge. It’s the best thing I’ve read on hydroxychloroquine. But beware: The piece is long and fascinating. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop, and it takes a good half hour to finish.

Doidge tells the tale of hydroxychloroquine, or HCQ as he calls it, as if the drug were a character in a story. His main point is that HCQ hasn’t received fair treatment in many quarters, including, unfortunately, some of the health experts advising the government of the United States. The main reasons are the intrusion of politics into medicine, the pitfalls and limitations of big data in medical science, and the over-reliance of many experts on random controlled testing to the exclusion of other kinds of evidence.

Doidge manages to make even a discussion of research methodology interesting. Here is a sample:

We now have studies that show one of the weaknesses of RCTs (random controlled testing) is that in the quest to eliminate confounding factors, they end up, in a majority of cases, excluding patients who are typical of those in the population. The RCT evangelist focuses only on the RCT strengths, and forgets their weaknesses. A typical RCT describes several data points about hundreds of patients. It can be helpful in determining what treatment might work for most people in a large population. A typical case history describes perhaps hundreds of data points about a single patient. Its focus might be on what treatment might work best for this patient. Sometimes we need all that information about a patient, to choose a proper treatment, because individual patients differ, often in decisive ways.

The Sleight-of-Hand Convention By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/the-sleight-of-hand-convention/

Biden’s speech was affecting, but the Democrats were awfully vague about what they plan to do if he wins.

Joe Biden delivered the best speech in a half-century political career on Thursday night. It was interesting to contrast his delivery with Kamala Harris’s 24 hours earlier. Both the presidential and vice-presidential nominees spoke to an empty hall. But Biden was forceful, emotional, emphatic, and clear-sighted as he made the case for an effective federal response to the coronavirus and a bipartisan reconstruction of the American polity after decades of increasing polarization. I couldn’t help thinking what the world would look like if Biden had disobeyed President Obama and run for president in 2016. It would be a very different place, I imagine.

But that’s not where we live. Biden’s impressive oratory capped off a four-day exercise in sleight of hand. The Democrats spent hours reminding Americans that Joe Biden is a decent and empathetic human being and that the current occupant of the White House has, shall we say, other qualities. But that’s about as specific as things got. Address after address, video montage after video montage, mentioned systemic racism and the injustices committed against indigenous people. I watched all of the convention, and the word “China” was not uttered until 10:57 p.m. on Thursday. Nor did any of the Democrats mention the violence that has erupted in America’s cities after the protests against the killing of George Floyd. Biden talked about jobs, but the American worker made only guest appearances in the four days of programming.

Nicole Russell :Raising a Child in a World Obsessed With Transgender Contagion

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/08/19/raising-a-child-in-a-world-obsessed-with-tra

In a column this week in The Washington Post headlined “Advice to parents on how to raise a happy and healthy LGBTQ child,” author Steven Petrow writes that only a small percentage of teenagers “identify” as lesbian, gay, or transgender.

At the same time, Petrow acknowledges examples of tweens and teenagers struggling with sexual orientation or gender identity.

Petrow, who is gay, portrays the phenomenon as urgent, yet at the same time points out that, statistically speaking, it’s actually rather small.

He’s right on both counts, and it’s vital that conservatives understand why—and what to do about it. The consequences of the LGBTQ movement will be detrimental to our young people if we don’t intervene and remain steadfast in truth and reality.

How are socialists deluding a whole generation? Learn more now >>

The progressive left is enamored with pushing the LGBTQ movement into the mainstream—particularly transgender issues—even though the number of young people struggling with their sexual orientation remains small.

BLM’s Association with Terrorist-Linked BDS Groups (part II) ****

https://acdemocracy.org/blms-association-with-terrorist-linked-bds-groups-part-ii/

Organizations and activists participating in the delegitimization campaign against Israel, support the boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, and expressly support US-designated Palestinian terror organizations, have strategically entrenched themselves in partnerships with Black Lives Matter (BLM) since the establishment of the movement in 2013.1 

By successfully creating coalitions with BLM, the delegitimization network has infiltrated and influenced the BLM agenda to openly support BDS and other anti-Israel causes. These include an explicit call for the divestment from Israel, which was featured prominently in the 2016 BLM platform, sending BLM delegations to the West Bank to protest the Israeli military and meeting with BDS leaders and convicted Palestinian terrorists. Several BLM founders and prominent leaders are connected to delegitimization organizations. These same leaders have gone beyond the call to divest from Israel or to oppose the United States (US) military-aid to Israel and have advocated for Palestinian terrorists and terror groups.

BLM Anti-Israel Policy Platforms

In 2016, BLM released a series of policy platforms, listing their political objectives. One of the platforms, “A Cut in US Military Expenditures and A Reallocation of those Funds to Invest in Domestic Infrastructure and Community Wellbeing,” cites the delegitimization (DLG) organizations Adalah, The US Campaign to End the Occupation, and Dream Defenders as organizations “currently working on policy.”2 According to the platform:

“The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people … Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people … Everyday, Palestinians are forced to walk through military checkpoints along the US funded apartheid wall.”3

The Anti-American 2020 Democrat Vision of America by Linda Goudsmit

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/24485/the-anti-american-2020-democrat-vision-of-america

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

In 2008, candidate Barack Hussein Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. Most Americans assumed he meant uniting the country and bringing Americans closer to our forefathers’ dreams of peace, harmony, prosperity, and equality. In 2008, most Americans had no idea what candidate Obama actually meant. Now it is 2020, and now we know.

The United States of America was born in revolution to the revolutionary ideology of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Our forefathers rejected monarchy, oligarchy, aristocracy, theocracy, and statist centralized government in all its forms. They fought to establish a representative constitutional republic that valued individual freedom and equality among men. The moral and ethical structure of American society was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and its Ten Commandments.

In 1776, the world was a very different place. Women were subservient to men. Slavery was practiced worldwide. Islam was not part of the American experience. It took seven weeks to sail from England to America, now it takes seven hours. This is important because all things are best understood in their historical context, especially politics.

The Battle Lines Are Drawn On Public Education Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-8-20-the-battle-lines-are-drawn-on

In a post a week ago, co-blogger (and daughter) Jane remarked that the school shut-downs resulting from the ongoing pandemic provided a golden opportunity for disruption of the monopoly unionized public school model. If schools wouldn’t re-open, perhaps the vast taxpayer funds at issue (or some substantial portion thereof) could simply be redirected to the parents to be used to educate their children as they see fit? Who could even object to that?

Well, make no mistake, the people running the show right now think that they have a sufficient lock on the situation that they can keep getting paid full dollar, provide little or no actual education for the money, and at the same time prevent any competitive alternatives from gaining a toehold. In its current configuration, the Democratic Party, at both state and national levels, is firmly committed to advancing the interests of their friends in the teachers unions, while the students — particularly minorities — get stuck in failure factories from which there is no escape.

The award for the most outrageous chutzpah on this subject goes to Michael Mulgrew, head of the New York United Federation of Teachers. Yesterday Mulgrew held a two-plus hour press conference on the subject of re-opening the New York City schools in September. Mayor de Blasio, to his at least partial credit, has proposed a partial re-opening beginning September 10, with parents having the option of sending their kids for several days a week of in-person learning. According to yesterday’s New York Post, Mulgrew was having none of it:

“Every single person — both adult and child — that is to enter an NYC school must have evidence that they do not have the COVID virus,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, told reporters at a press conference, where he laid out the demand. . . . “If all the schools open on Sept. 10, and everything that we just laid out is not in place, the union is prepared to go to court and/or go on strike, if we need to,” he said.

Joe Biden offers platitudes, not policies His speech struck some chords but left several silences Charles Lipson

https://spectator.us/joe-biden-platitudes-policies-democratic-national-convention/

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.

First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.

Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows. He’s proud of his working-class roots and proud he has fostered a close, loving family as father and grandfather. The lead-up to his speech captured that well with pictures of his parents and video of his family today.

Biden’s admirable personal qualities shone through, allowing him to bond with voters in ways Hillary Clinton never could. They also reinforced a central message of his campaign: I’m a guy like most of you; I’m on your side and will work hard for you; I don’t think of myself as superior; together, we can have a brighter future.

Scholarly Debate is Dead Cause of death: Twitter mobs.by John Eastman

https://americanmind.org/essays/scholarly-debate-is-dead/

A little opinion article I published in Newsweek last week raising questions about Senator Kamala Harris’s eligibility for the office of Vice President has created quite a firestorm of controversy. For nearly 20 years—based on extensive scholarly research and long before Senator Harris was tapped to be former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate—I have been questioning whether the current generally-accepted view of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause is correct. I have published numerous articles about the subject, both scholarly and popular, asking whether it is right to interpret the amendment as meaning that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen no matter the circumstances. I have testified about the matter several times before Congress and state legislative bodies, in a wide range of contexts.

I first raised the issue publicly in a brief that former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and I submitted to the Supreme Court back in 2003 in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi was an unlawful combatant in the Taliban who was treated as a citizen because he had been born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana while his father was in the United States on a temporary work visa.

I addressed similar or in some cases identical questions about citizenship in general, and natural-born citizenship in particular (and hence, about eligibility for the offices of president and vice-president) when Senator John McCain was a nominee for President, when Governor Mitt Romney was a nominee for President, when Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were candidates for President, and when Governor Nikki Haley’s name was floated as a possible nominee for Vice President.