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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

As Covid Evolves, Treatments May Prove as Important as Vaccines The FDA has approved only a few therapeutic drugs. Many studies suggest promising options.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-covid-evolves-treatments-may-prove-as-important-as-vaccines-11613083638?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New Covid-19 variants are eluding antibody treatments and may render vaccines less effective. To keep up, physicians need a broader arsenal of therapies that the virus can’t easily defeat. But the Food and Drug Administration has authorized precious few treatments for Covid-19, namely Gilead’s antiviral remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Eli Lilly. The National Institutes of Health has prioritized monoclonal antibodies—essentially manufactured copies of human antibodies—which have shown promise against other diseases, including cancer.

The rub is that mutations that alter the shape of the spike protein on the surface of the virus—as variants from the U.K., Brazil and South Africa do—can deform the sites to which antibodies bind before they neutralize the virus. Developing new antibody cocktails that target new variants could become a game of Whac-A-Mole.

The good news is that Gilead says remdesivir appears effective against the new strains. It is the only FDA-approved antiviral for Covid-19, and the five-day infusion treatment is limited to hospital patients. Antivirals, which stop viruses from replicating in human cells, are typically most effective early in an illness. So finding other effective antivirals, especially ones that can be prescribed to outpatients, should be a priority.

Antivirals can gum up virus replication in myriad ways. Remdesivir creates a paper jam in the coronavirus’s copy machine so it can’t distribute copies of its genetic code. Scientists at the University of Texas last month published a study in the journal Molecular Cell in which they identified the key mechanism remdesivir uses to inhibit the virus’s replication. That could lead to the creation of more potent and perhaps ingestible drugs.

“What if you could take just one pill and that was all you needed to do?” as study co-author Kenneth Johnson was quoted in a UT press release. “That would make a huge difference in terms of the here and now.”

Democrats Present ‘Doctored’ Video of Capitol Riot During Trump Impeachment Trial By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/09/democrats-present-doctored-video-of-capitol-riot-during-trump-impeachment-trial-n1424341

At the start of the Senate impeachment trial, House impeachment managers presented video “evidence” of the mob that stormed the Capitol. The Hill described it as a “disturbing video documenting the Jan. 6 siege by interweaving Trump’s address to a group of supporters calling on them to march on the Capitol with violent footage of the attack.”

Interweaving? That’s correct, the video presented by the Democrats was not a straight video of Trump’s speech, but rather a collage of selectively edited clips of Trump’s speech mixed with select clips of video from the assault on the Capitol.

I’m sorry but didn’t the media call videos edited like this “doctored” recently?

Why yes, they did!

In May of 2019, Nancy Pelosi stuttered her way through a press conference following a failed meeting with Trump, a compilation was compiled and shown on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business. President Trump retweeted the video. The Hill described the video Trump shared as “edited to make it seem like [Nancy Pelosi] was stuttering,”

Overwrought Nazi Analogies for Me, but Not for Thee? Josh Hammer

https://www.newsweek.com/overwrought-nazi-analogies-me-not-thee-opinion-1568759

EXCERPTS

Earlier this week, Lucasfilm severed ties with “The Mandalorian” actress Gina Carano after a hyperbolic social media post in which she compared current political imperiousness and cancel culture in the United States—and the treatment of “wrong-thinking” Americans who hold views at odds with those of ruling class elites—to the 1930s-era treatment of German Jewry by the then-ascendant Nazi regime. But Carano deleted the post.

Carano’s tale, in isolation, would be bemusing but hardly newsworthy. What makes this story affirmatively galling is how it yet again evinces an ever-widening chasm between ruling class elites and the dissident “deplorables” over whom they deign to rule.

More generally, the American Left has spent large swaths of the past four years hysterically comparing then-President Donald Trump, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew and who is likely the most aggressively pro-Jewish president in American history, to Adolf Hitler. It would be trite, not to mention impossible, to enumerate all the examples. The armchair sloganeering and rote analogizing were truly ubiquitous across CNN, MSNBC and the other myriad bastions of progressive media or cultural clout. It became old hat to compare Antifa, properly understood as a domestic terror organization, to the valiant American patriots who stormed the beach of Normandy on D-Day—thus equating the Trump administration with the Third Reich.

Hillary Clinton Claims If Trump Is Acquitted It’s ‘Because The Jury Includes His Co-Conspirators’ By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hillary-clinton-claims-if-trump-is-acquitted-its-because-the-jury-includes-his-co-conspirators/

Hillary Clinton on Wednesday claimed that if former President Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial ends in his acquittal it will be because “the jury includes his co-conspirators.”

“If Senate Republicans fail to convict Donald Trump, it won’t be because the facts were with him or his lawyers mounted a competent defense,” Clinton said in a tweet Wednesday morning. “It will be because the jury includes his co-conspirators.”

Clinton, who served as secretary of state during the Obama administration, waded into the conversation before the second day of the trial began. House Democrats, joined by ten Republicans, voted last month to pass a single article of impeachment — “incitement of an insurrection” — against Trump after a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Trump Lawyer Left Impeachment Trial to Totally Trash the Democrats’ Entire Narrative Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/11/trump-impeachment-you-only-act-like-this-when-you-know-you-have-the-votes-in-the-bag-n2584616

This trial is over. It’s done. And Donald J. Trump will not be convicted. We all knew this. The preview to this trial was showcased in the resolution Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) brought up which denounced this effort as unconstitutional. The Democrats who wish to convict Trump and bar him from running again are many, many miles shy of the 67-vote threshold. What’s odd in that vote is that Mitch McConnell, who has reportedly walked away from Trump and is supportive of Democrats’ efforts in this trial, voted in favor of dismissing the trial. If he wants to purge Trumpism from the GOP, which he reportedly said he wants to do—then this is the first step. Maybe he saw the polling that showed how the GOP is Trump’s party now. Period. 

The second vote on the constitutionality of this impeachment trial was another preview showing that Democrats are well shy of their 67-vote threshold to convict. Of course, it passed—but conviction is an entirely different animal. That’s why I couldn’t care less if Bruce Castor, one of Trump’s lawyers, had a garrulous argument against this whole circus. We’ve won. It’s over. It’s a total waste of time. Democrats won’t have the votes. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even phoned Trump to tell him he’s going to be just fine. All this did was remind voters how Congress does nothing. It’s all show. It’s all talk, no action. And why populism is rising. This city is killing this country. 

When you know you have the votes to protect your client, you can simply walk out of the arguments to have an interview with Fox News and trash this whole exercise as an entertainment spectacle, which is exactly what Doug Schoen, another Trump attorney, did today (via Mediaite):

During arguments from the Democrats, Fox’s John Roberts and Sandra Smith cut away from the trial for an interview with Trump’s defense attorney, who was apparently in the Russell Rotunda instead of witnessing the case against his client. As CNN and MSNBC stuck with the ongoing trial against the former president for incitement of insurrection, Roberts kicked off the Schoen interview by asking if it was true the Trump defense team will conclude after one day of arguments instead of two.

Stop Calling It an ‘Insurrection’ Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/02/11/stop-calling-it-an-insurrection-n2584502

So, I was out at dinner with my old battalion commander – literally outside, because dining inside apparently is super deadly if you live under blue tyranny – and we were laughing at this whole “Muh Insurrekshun” nonsense. What happened January 6 was no “insurrection” in any meaningful sense of the word, especially not to those who survived the riots of 2020, and not to us either. See, I was my old battalion commander’s assistant operations officer and I was riding with him in his HUMVEE driving through Los Angeles as it burned in April 1992.

That was a riot. What happened on Capitol Hill was a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops while a few hundred other dudes took selfies in the Rotunda.

We were in the 3rd Battalion, 160th Infantry, the first combat arms unit on the street during the LA Riot, a riot brought to you by Maxine Waters and other idiots, by the way. There was burning and looting and dozens we can say with absolute certainty were murdered by the LA rioters, unlike at the Capitol. It lasted for days. You wouldn’t know it from Rep. Stolen Cower, who seems to claim she suffered PTSD from being at the far end of the same ZIP code as the bruhaha, but what happened on January 6 was no “insurrection,” and Republicans need to stop playing along with the Establishment talking point that it was.

The idea of an “insurrection” is to delegitimize all resistance to the garbage Establishment’s reign of error, and to play along is to give credence to its lie and to empower its propaganda.

The World Goes On While America Sleeps While we are busy devouring each other, China is smiling that once-feared American running-dog capitalists have become laughable Keystone Cops. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/10/the-world-goes-on-while-america-sleeps/

The Democratically-controlled Senate spends thousands of collective hours conducting an impeachment trial against a president who is no longer president. 

The acquittal is predetermined, as in the first impeachment effort a year ago—and known to be so to the Democratic prosecutors. 

The constitutionally mandated presiding judge—the chief justice of the United States—refused to show up.  

Chief Justice John Roberts apparently believes an impeachment trial of a private citizen is either a waste of time or unconstitutional—or both. 

The Democratic House of Representatives is busy ferreting out purportedly extremist Republican members. For the first time in memory, one party now removes committee members of the other. 

Yet for each Republican outlier, there is a corresponding Democratic firebrand member who has either called for violence or voiced anti-Semitic slurs—and yet will not be removed from House committees. 

So the asymmetrical tit-for-tat continues. 

The subtext to this madness is that the Democratic Congress, the new administration, the administrative state, and the political Left are obsessed with dismembering the presidential corpse of now citizen Donald Trump.  

Apparently, they fear that one day he will rise from the infernal regions to wreak his revenge.  

Speaking of incitement… By Harry White

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/speaking_of_incitement_.html

“Words that incite insurrection aren’t protected by the First Amendment.  Words that don’t are.  Listen to Trump’s words. Then listen to Maxine Waters.”

We are a nation of laws, including one prohibiting insurrection.  A citizen charged with and arrested for the crime of inciting insurrection (a felony) in Washington DC would be tried under Title 18 of the US code, with insurrection punishable by a fine, a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, or both.

A sitting president can’t be arrested for the crime of inciting insurrection; he can’t be incarcerated and tried for any crime whatsoever, under a long-standing legal precedent against indicting a sitting president.  Rather, he is charged (impeached) in the House, should our representatives want to remove him from office, and tried in the Senate, where he faces the punishment of removal from office only (no fine or jail sentence).

While some people were dying to see President Trump arrested and incarcerated, forget impeached and removed from office, that’s not how things work in America.  A president is protected from arrest and incarceration: the U.S. Department of Justice has long held that arrest and incarceration “would essentially incapacitate the executive branch, undermining its ability to ‘perform its constitutionally assigned functions.’”  Protecting a president makes perfect sense.

Dems’ Next Plot Against Trump If Senate impeachment trial fails. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/dems-next-plot-against-trump-if-senate-impeachment-joseph-klein/

With the Senate impeachment trial underway that is virtually certain to end in acquittal, the Democrats are already planning their next move against Donald Trump. They are looking to use an obscure clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, written in the aftermath of the Civil War and aimed at disqualifying ex-Confederate rebels from public office, to bar Trump from holding any future public office. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment allows for the disqualification of individuals from holding federal or state office who both previously (1) took an oath to support the U.S. Constitution as a federal or state government legislator or officer, and (2) then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

The Democrats leading the charge on the Fourteenth Amendment gambit include Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Dick Durbin of Illinois, along with Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Steve Cohen of Tennessee. They are being advised by leftist academics who believe that Congress has the unilateral power to pass a joint resolution invoking the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification provision against Trump. As far as the Trump-haters are concerned, it is perfectly all right to put aside due process and fundamental fairness, so long as Trump is barred from holding public office ever again.

Republicans Need to Stop Accepting Progressives’ ‘Facts’ How the self-proclaimed party of “science” is undermining democracy. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/republicans-need-stop-accepting-progressives-facts-bruce-thornton/

As the self-proclaimed party of “science,” progressives assert that their interpretations and explanations of people and events comprise “facts” that only the ignorant or evil refuse to believe. But this faith in science more often reflects the nostrums of scientism: contested ideas or beliefs that present themselves with the jargon, formulas, and quantitative data that characterize real scientific research, but that lack the reproducibility and established foundational facts that support authentic scientific research.

As such, these “facts” of scientism reflect ideological and political aims that appropriate the prestige and authority of science to camouflage their partisan prejudices. Unfortunately, too many Republicans in their public discourse and deliberations accept these “facts” as truth, thus empowering technocratic progressives by legitimizing their malign policies.

Climate change, of course, is a prominent example of this phenomenon. But anthropogenic, catastrophic global warming (ACGW)––the actual theory disguised by the banal, self-evident phrase “climate change”––is not a scientific fact, but a theory with some facts that support it, but others that challenge it. Our foundational knowledge of global climate as of now is too incomplete, and so is unable to create a predictive model because we do not yet fully understand or can quantify how all the numerous components that govern global climate over time interrelate. Yet based just on one element, human-created CO2 concentrations, warmists conclude that doomsday for the planet is around the corner.

Despite that uncertainty, too many Republicans accept the “scientific consensus” and “settled science” canards and support carbon taxes or other policies created by Joe Biden’s executive orders, like the ban on fracking. But carbon taxes, even if ACGW is true, will only increase the price of energy, while doing nothing about the true drivers of increased CO2––China and India.