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Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trudeau’s Coronavirus Power Grab Canada’s prime minister asks for the authority to tax, spend and borrow without Parliament’s approval. By Elliot Kaufman

By on March 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trudeaus-coronavirus-power-grab-11585174923?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Toronto

“Emergency bill would grant cabinet sweeping powers to tax and spend without parliamentary approval through end of 2021,” announced Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper Monday. I readied for a feeling of resignation: I guess Aung San Suu Kyi really has lost it. Or perhaps cynicism: Putin decided to make it official, eh? But to my surprise, the article was about Canada and its progressive prime minister, Justin Trudeau. If this is multiculturalism, he’s taken it too far.

Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party planned to introduce economic relief legislation Tuesday morning and had already distributed copies to some opposition parliamentarians in preparation. At 44 pages, the draft bill was relatively brief. Then again, how complicated is it to define arbitrary power?

The bill would have allowed Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet to raise taxes, impose new taxes, spend and borrow by fiat, all without a vote in Parliament. Apparently the coronavirus pandemic is so dire that Liberals thought there wouldn’t be time, at least until 2022, to vote on matters of fiscal policy.

This power grab quickly fizzled. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals won a mere 33% of the aggregate popular vote in this past October’s election, the lowest percentage for a governing party in Canadian history. Leading a minority government, the prime minister needs some support from his opponents to enact legislation. How did he imagine that conversation would go?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York Dems Demand Coronavirus Cash for Museum w/$2.9 Billion Endowment Daniel Greenfield

By on March 25th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/03/new-york-dems-demand-coronavirus-cash-museum-w29-daniel-greenfield/

Fear not ladies and sufferers, the Pelosi coronavirus pigout is just getting started.

New York is facing an eruption in coronavirus cases. And what’s on the minds of its Dem delegation? Ventilators, masks? Museums.

“NYC isn’t NYC without our non-profit museums. But if we want our museums to survive COVID-19, we need to protect them NOW. That’s why I led the NYC Congressional delegation with @RepMaloney in calling for $4 billion in emergency funds to equip museums to outlast this pandemic,” Rep Nadler tweeted.

How many ventilators could $4 billion buy? We know the answer to that one.

In 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million.

But why bother. Now it’s time for the pork pigout.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Coronavirus May Make Trump Stronger Gallup finds 60% of voters approve of his handling of the crisis. As usual, the establishment is clueless. By Walter Russell Mead

By on March 25th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-virus-may-make-trump-stronger-11585149792?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

This is not what his critics expected. At 49% overall job approval in the latest Gallup poll, and with 60% approval of the way he is handling the coronavirus epidemic, President Trump’s standing with voters has improved even as the country closed down and the stock market underwent a historic meltdown. That may change as this unpredictable crisis develops, but bitter and often justified criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision making in the early months of the pandemic has so far failed to break the bond between the 45th president and his political base.

One reason Mr. Trump’s opponents have had such a hard time damaging his connection with voters is that they still don’t understand why so many Americans want a wrecking-ball presidency. Beyond attributing Mr. Trump’s support to a mix of racism, religious fundamentalism and profound ignorance, the president’s establishment opponents in both parties have yet to grasp the depth and intensity of the populist energy that animates his base and the Bernie Sanders movement.

The sheer number of voters in open political rebellion against centrist politics is remarkable. Adding the Sanders base (36% of the Democratic vote in the latest Real Clear Politics poll average, or roughly 13% of the national vote considering that about 45% of voters lean Democratic) to the core Trump base of roughly 42%, and around 55% of U.S. voters now support politicians who openly despise the central assumptions of the political establishment.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

With Lives and the Economy on the Line, Nancy Pelosi Stalls Wuhan Coronavirus Relief Bill By Stephen Green

By on March 25th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/with-lives-and-the-economy-on-the-line-nancy-pelosi-stalls-wuhan-coronavirus-relief-bill/

Shameful.Utterly, despicably shameful.

Having tried and failed in the first half of this to lard up the coronavirus relief bill with extraneous goodies and intrusive regulations to please her rabidly progressive constituency, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to take her bat and ball and go home for the day.

We’re in a situation where every day, every hour counts. Every day that passes without a paycheck or unemployment relief is a day untold numbers of families grow closer to losing their homes. Every hour that money doesn’t go out to manufacturers is another hour hospitals have to wait for masks and ventilators. Every hour some sick New Yorker has to wait for another hospital bed. Every dinner out postponed, every canceled event, every missed business opportunity is another step closer to economic collapse.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress knows what to do: Pass a clean bill and get it on the President’s desk. Pronto.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pelosi Reacts to Virus Stimulus Deal, Declines to Say When House Will Vote By Zachary Stieber

By on March 25th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pelosi-reacts-to-virus-stimulus-deal-declines-to-say-when-house-will-vote_3285249.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said staffers and representatives are reviewing the stimulus deal reached in the Senate overnight Tuesday while declining to commit to a vote in the House on Wednesday.

“We have our staff and our chairman reviewing the bill. I’m optimistic but we’ll see,” Pelosi told reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

Asked if the House could vote as early as today, Pelosi said: “No, we haven’t seen the bill yet. The Senate will vote first.”

“We’ll see the bill and see when the Senate votes,” she added. “So there’s no decision about timing until we see the bill.”

The House went into session at 10 a.m. for a brief session before adjourning in less than two minutes. There’s nothing on the schedule until 11 a.m. Thursday.

House Democrats plan to hold several conference calls throughout the day on the deal the Senate reached and plans for voting on the agreement, C-Span’s Craig Caplan reported.

The White House and leaders in the Senate reached a deal on a $2 trillion relief package overnight. The package includes direct payments of up to $3,000 to most American families as well as creating a $367 billion program for small business loans.

“This is a wartime level of investment into our nation,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor after the two sides had reached a deal. “The men and women of the greatest country on Earth are going to defeat this coronavirus and reclaim our future.”

Senators said they plan to vote on the package on Wednesday. The Senate was slated to reconvene at 12 p.m.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns

By on March 25th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/inaccurate-virus-models-are-panicking-officials-into-ill-advised-lockdowns/

As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case.

A scan of statements made by media, state governors, local leaders, county judges, and more show many relying on the same source, an online mapping tool called COVID Act Now. The website says it is “built to enable political leaders to quickly make decisions in their Coronavirus response informed by best available data and modeling.”

An interactive map provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to “flatten the curve.” But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister.

When Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins announced a shelter-in-place order on Dallas County Sunday, he displayed COVID Act Now graphs with predictive outcomes after three months if certain drastic measures are taken. The NBC Dallas affiliate also embedded the COVID Act Now models in their story on the mandate.

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

US was more prepared for pandemic than any other country, Johns Hopkins study found Greg Re

By on March 25th, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-was-most-prepared-country-in-the-world-for-pandemics-johns-hopkins-study-found-in-2019

The United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) — an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The Global Health Security Index was was “developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit” from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. “More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”

At the same time, the paper noted that the U.S. score was still not perfect, and that “factors driving down the U.S. score include the risks of social unrest and terrorism, and low public confidence in government.”

President Trump’s campaign has argued in recent days that misinformation may be one of the leading causes of that lack of confidence. For example, Trump’s team has pointed to claims by presidential contender Joe Biden that “no one on the National Security Council staff was put in charge” of pandemic preparedness, based on a report that in May 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in a reorganization effort.

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

Abolish the World Health Organization Stephen L. Miller

By on March 25th, 2020

https://spectator.us/abolish-world-health-organization/

Way back on January 10, the official Twitter account of the World Health Organization declared that ‘WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan, #China.’ The tweet went on to say that ‘It is generally considered that entry screening offers little benefit, while requiring considerable resources.’ A follow-up tweet described how ‘WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on #China based on the information currently available.’

What we’ve learned since is that China was by then already engaged in a massive cover-up of the release and spread of the virus. It imprisoned doctors (one of whom would later die from contracting COVID-19) who attempted to warn the World Health Organization and the world.

On January 14, the same Twitter account blasted out that ‘Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.’

Two wrong tweets shouldn’t call into the question the creditability of the World Health Organization, but the direction in which its director-general, Tedros Adhanom, has steered the WHO, and his unwillingness to diverge from Beijing’s public pronouncements, should trouble the world.

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MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY- A DOSE OF HUMOR

By on March 25th, 2020

DAVE PELL REVISED SOME POEMS FOR THE AGE OF COVID

Here are just a few…..”Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled. Duh.”

“- I wandered lonely as a cloud, as the CDC advised.”

“- -Hope springs eternal in the human breast .Just avoid the face.”

“Do not go gentle into that good night without first Purelling.”

And my friend Rich Baehr ponders:

 “Now the big question- with all the sheltering in place and social distancing, and given the history of big city blackouts, I expect the birth rate to increase 9 months to a year from now. What shall we call this new class of babies- coronials or covidians?  In Waco, I assume they would be branch covidians. “

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

This Crisis Vindicates Trump’s America with Borders By Brian Lonergan

By on March 25th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/24/this-crisis-vindicates-trumps-america-with-borders/

Coronavirus and its awful toll may be ending a second American holiday from history, one in which we entertained boutique notions like a world without borders and all the existential risks that come with it.

Great leaders, history has taught us, are often vilified in their own time and later exonerated as events vindicate their warnings. Churchill warned about the Nazi war machine when “peace in our time” was briefly fashionable. Reagan outraged the political class when he said that Soviet communism should be defeated, not contained. Similarly, events are already vindicating Donald Trump for his stand that national borders matter.

Since Trump descended the escalator in the summer of 2015, he has argued that a nation must protect itself from outside threats. Those threats could include violent criminals, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and, as it happens, infectious diseases. For this and other apostasies, Trump’s opponents have all but anointed him the Prince of Darkness.

It took a global health crisis for the world to come around to Trump’s position. Borders are suddenly relevant again. Countries that once embraced globalism are now following Trump’s lead and protecting their borders. Allowing citizens of the world to enter a country with little or no scrutiny now seems like a quaint, naïve position of a bygone era.

The borders issue is not think-tank fodder—it is now a matter of life or death.

On January 31, the administration announced that it would temporarily bar foreigners from entering the United States if they had been to China within the previous 14 days. We may never know how many lives were saved by that action. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) credited this decision at the time for being “the single most consequential and valuable thing” done to combat coronavirus.

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