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Ruth King

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The Deadly Costs of Extended Shutdown Orders By Heather Mac Donald

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/22/the-deadly-costs-of-extended-shutdown-orders/

The focus on saving “just one life” from the coronavirus to the exclusion of all other considerations likely will prove a catastrophic failure of policymaking. The devastation to individuals’ ability to flourish or even survive may soon become irreversible.

More than a dozen governors extended their economic shutdown orders recently into May and beyond. Those officials should have publicly addressed the following questions first:

How many coronavirus deaths do you expect to avert by the shut-down extension?
What will your state’s economy look like after another month of enforced stasis?
How many workers will have lost their jobs?
How many businesses will have closed for good?
How many of your state’s young residents, seeking employment for the first time, will be unable to find it?

Instead, the announcements of the prolonged shutdown were representative of government decision-making during the coronavirus crisis: opaque, lacking in criteria for measuring success and failure, and bereft of any attempt to measure the benefits of mitigating one particular health problem against the costs—including other health problems.

New York’s tele-ubiquitous governor, Andrew Cuomo, for example, announced on April 15 that New York’s economy would now be shut down through May 15, instead of reopening on April 29, as previously scheduled. How did he arrive at May 15? It is a mystery. Other governors had just as inscrutably chosen May 3, May 4, May 8, May 20, or June 10 for their extensions.

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Turkey: Erdoğan Is Getting Coronavirus Dancing to His Tune by Burak Bekdil

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15914/erdogan-approval-coronavirus

One of the laws Turkey’s rubber-stamp parliament passed before the recess allowed the release of tens of thousands of common criminals to ease overcrowding in jails and protect inmates from the coronavirus pandemic. The amnesty, however, excluded hundreds of political prisoners including journalists, writers, academics and social media users critical of Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime

In 2020, the collective fear is the coronavirus pandemic. And just as in the previous instances based on fear, it seems to be working in Erdoğan’s advantage.

“The people tend to unite behind strong leaders in times of national crisis like war, terror, security threats, disasters or pandemic.” — Özer Sencar, president of Metropoll, non-partisan pollster, Hurriyet, April 16, 2020.

When a group of military officers attempted a putsch to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016, the Islamist strongman replied with two reflexes: survival, and a vigorous political campaign to make political gains from the failed coup. He succeeded in both.

Most Turks, including Erdoğan’s opponents, weary of decades of military coups, united behind him to resist the putsch that ended up killing 250 people and wounded more than 2,000. Erdoğan’s approval rating rose sharply from 45% before the failed coup to 67.6% in its aftermath. For many observers, that was not a surprise. Only a year earlier, Erdoğan had gambled over the Turks’ collective security concerns and won.

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Iran’s Ayatollahs Will Struggle to Survive the Oil Slump by Con Coughlin

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15923/iran-struggle-oil-price

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has tried to put a brave face on the latest setback to hit the regime, claiming that Iran is unlikely to suffer as much as other countries from the oil price drop because it is less reliant than others on crude exports.

If that were truly the case, then Tehran would not be asking the IMF for a bailout, and Mr Rouhani, together with Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, would not be begging Washington to remove sanctions.

The truth of the matter is, for all the regime’s attempts to claim it has everything under control, that the country is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the ayatollahs are fast running out of options to save themselves.

At a time when Iran’s Islamic regime is already facing unprecedented pressure over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as its disastrous handling of the economy, the global slump in oil prices could well prove to be the final straw for the ayatollahs.

Even before this week’s dramatic collapse in global oil prices, which saw the key gauge of U.S. crude prices, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, tumble into negative territory for the first time in history, the mullahs were already under intense pressure over their catastrophic running of the country during their four decades in power.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Venezuela: Maduro’s Cuban Army by Lawrence A. Franklin

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15921/venezuela-maduro-cuban-army

The U.S. Department of Justice accuses Maduro of having served as the chief of a narcotics organization called “the Cartel of the Suns.” Maduro’s drug cartel is further alleged to have helped arm an extremist faction of the Colombia-based Marxist terrorist group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in its decades-long campaign to overthrow Colombia’s government. Maduro’s cartel has also allegedly worked with FARC to flood the U.S. with cocaine.

The intensity of Maduro’s attack against Trump may indicate a sense of panic at the possibility that the U.S. drug indictment might be setting the stage for some kind of military action against the socialist regime that will oust him from power.

Short of a U.S.-supported invasion by an international coalition, including free Latin American states, perhaps sometime after the U.S. election, Maduro will continue to wreck the formerly oil- rich country as its people continue to live in misery.

More than fifty countries in the Euro-Atlantic and Hispanic Free World consider the Venezuelan regime led by dictator Nicolás Maduro to be illegitimate. This view also seems to be shared by millions of Venezuelans, more than four million of whom have fled the country’s political oppression and economic depression.

The main reason for the charge of illegitimacy stems from the view that Maduro’s victory for a second six-year term as president in Venezuela’s 2018 national elections was fraudulent. Opposition protests have failed to dislodge the socialist-led regime, which has so far been sustained by Chinese loans, Russian weapons and Cuban troops. The Venezuelan people, disenfranchised and disarmed, have, in addition, been bullied into submission by pro-regime neighborhood revolutionary leftist gangs called “colectivos.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Earth Day Overshadowed This Year By An Actual Crisis Henry I. Miller and Andrew I. Fillat

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/04/22/earth-day-overshadowed-this-year-by-an-actual-crisis/

April 22 is Earth Day, a celebration conceived by then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and first held in 1970 as a “symbol of environmental responsibility and stewardship.” In the spirit of the time, it was a touchy-feely, consciousness-raising, New Age experience. Most activities were organized at the grassroots level.

In recent years, however, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of apocalypse, dish anti-technology dirt, and proselytize.

However, if there was ever a time that Earth Day’s hysteria was completely overshadowed by genuine apocalyptic scenarios, the COVID-19 pandemic is providing it.

Passion and zeal now trump science on Earth Days, and provability takes a back seat to plausibility. The Earth Day Network, which organizes events and advocacy, regularly distorts science and exaggerates fears in order to advance its Big Government agenda.

With a theme of “Climate Change,” this year’s event is no exception. In the United States, the prototype of climate activism is the Green New Deal (GND), which is impractical, unworkable, monumentally expensive – and lethal.

Its price tag – tens of trillions of dollars – means that, were it to be implemented, the GND would lead to what has been dubbed “statistical murder,” because the diversion of resources to fund it would exert a so-called “income effect” on health and longevity that reflects the correlation between wealth and health. 

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POLITICS Comments turned off

A black Georgia Democrat who endorsed Trump is driven out office By Andrea Widburg

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/a_black_georgia_democrat_who_endorsed_trump_is_driven_out_office.html

“Rep. Vernon Jones has been subjected to unrelenting harassment from black Democrats furious with him for saying Trump has done more for blacks than Biden ever did.”

Happily, Democrats in Georgia don’t have the option of executing politically disfavored people, but they’ll certainly do their best to erase them from history. Former state representative Vernon Jones, a black Democrat who supports Trump, has discovered that, if you’re an apostate from the Democrat party, you will be driven from the fold.

Last week, Jones endorsed President Donald Trump for a second term. His reasoning was straightforward:

“It’s very simple to me. President Trump’s handling of the economy, his support for historically black colleges and his criminal justice initiatives drew me to endorse his campaign,” said Jones, who added that he had no immediate plans to switch parties.

“There are a lot of African Americans who clearly see and appreciate he’s doing something that’s never been done before,” Jones said. “When you look at the unemployment rates among black Americans before the pandemic, they were at historic lows. That’s just a fact.”

Georgia Democrats responded swiftly and brutally. Not only did they repeat the usual baseless canards about Trump’s racism, they instantly tried to un-person Jones:

State Democratic officials tried Tuesday to disown Jones, a former chief executive of DeKalb County, Georgia’s biggest Democratic stronghold. State Sen. Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the state party, called him an “embarrassment” who doesn’t reflect Georgia values.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Cuomo, de Blasio, and New York City Owe Trump an Apology By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/cuomo_de_blasio_and_new_york_city_owe_trump_an_apology.html

“It is not President Trump who has fallen short in doing his job. Rather, it is Governor Cuomo and his sidekick Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City.”

Many Americans have witnessed daily briefings in which New York State’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, makes repeated demands of the President and exploits his moment in the sun by condemning the President and even maligning him. Instead of constantly complaining, it’s about time Cuomo apologized to President Trump and to those Americans across the country who specifically helped NYC during her time of need. It is not President Trump who has fallen short in doing his job, rather governor Cuomo and his side-kick Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City.

Three weeks ago Cuomo was demanding ventilators, masks, gowns, and hospital beds.  He made no demands of himself, rather of the President. But now many are asking why the governor had not spent his many years in office accumulating the supplies needed for the emergencies and epidemics that surely transpire. In President Trump’s desire to help the country and specifically the state where he was born and raised, Mr. Trump did not haggle over the question of whose responsibility it is to take care of state needs, but instead dove headlong to supply what New York needed. While Cuomo spent his days grandstanding and pontificating, and alternating his made-for-TV attire between informal leather jackets one day, blazers the next, presidential suits, and then sweaters, Mr. Trump was marshaling and corralling every force in this country and around the globe to provide the needs of New York state. Cuomo always looks well rested while Mr. Trump, the heroic workhorse, looks exhausted. We now know why: one is playing soap-opera governor while the other is a minute-by-minute, indefatigable President.

Mr. Cuomo is never satisfied. Like a spoiled prince he upped the ante every time the President fulfilled Cuomo’s previous demands. Cuomo spoke of 4,000 ventilators, then 30,000 ventilators, then possibly a million ventilators. The governor of New York had the luxury of extrapolating his demands because it was not he, rather President Trump, who was personally bearing and shouldering the supply-chain responsibility.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Old Confederate-Flag Canard By Rich Lowry

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/media-smear-michigan-lockdown-protesters-confederate-flag-canard/

The Michigan anti-lockdown protest was a sea of American flags.

It feels like 2009 redux, with spontaneous anti-government protests, once again, getting smeared.

Of course, the proximate cause of the protests this time is the coronavirus lockdowns rather than Obamacare, although the feel of the demonstrations — expressing populist anger at government overreach — is the same, and so is the reaction of the critics.

The line of attack is the familiar one of using a few isolated idiots or kooks to tar the entire enterprise. To this end, if there’s one thing Democrats (and the media) want you to know about the anti-lockdown protest at the Michigan state capitol in Lansing last week, it’s that people were flying Confederate flags.

“What happened yesterday was inexcusable,” Representative Debbie Dingell (D., Mich.) said. “People did not have masks. They didn’t have gloves. They did not distance themselves. They had Confederate flags, swastikas.”

Governor Gretchen Whitmer scolded, “When people are flying the Confederate flag and untold numbers who gassed up on the way here or grabbed a bite on the way home — we know that this rally endangered people.”

The idea that they “had swastikas,” as Dingell said, is meant to mislead. A few protesters, in particular a widely photographed woman with a “Heil Witmer” (sic) sign, used swastikas to depict the governor as a fascist (obviously, a ridiculously over-the-top charge), not to identify themselves as Nazis.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Facing New Crises, Macron Repackages Old, Bad Ideas By Andrew Stuttaford

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/facing-new-crises-macron-repackages-old-bad-ideas/

The French president sees COVID-19 as yet another opportunity to deepen European integration.

At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

In his view, the interviewers report, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to put an end to the “hyper-financialized world,” a phantom that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of communitarians, academics who refer to “late capitalism,” and European politicians. (Recall that, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an earlier French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — seemingly oblivious to the political and economic developments of the previous hundred years — announced that laissez-faire capitalism was “finished.”)

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

KATIE HOPKINS- LIFE UNDER LOCKDOWN IN THE U.K. ON THE GLAZOV SHOW VIDEO

By on April 23rd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/katie-hopkins-video-life-under-lockdown-uk-frontpagemagcom/

Britain’s freedom fighter unveils The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

[This video is brought to you by a David Horowitz Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration. Please help the Freedom Center continue to bring you these vital perspectives on the news – perspectives that you won’t find anywhere else. Donate to the Freedom Center HERE.]

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

This new Glazov Gang episode features Katie Hopkins, U.K.’s freedom fighter. Katie unveils Life Under Lockdown in the U.K., shedding a sober and telling light on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Don’t miss it!

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