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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Wikipedia’s leftist bias called out by its co-founder, who is leading the start-up of a rival to be truly unbiased By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/wikipedias_leftist_bias_called_out_by_its_cofounder_

The left’s capture of Wikipedia and its transformation into a progressive propaganda organ has had profound political consequences. Founded on the premise of “NPOV,” or neutral point of view, the free online encyclopedia now downplays now often omits entirely points unfavorable to the left, while pushing left wing tropes. It’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, is angry at the betrayal of its original promise. Carrie Sheffield writes at Just the News:

Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy — known as  “NPOV,” or neutral point of view — “is dead.”

Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.” 

Sanger referred to a Fox News report last week by Maxim Lott, which noted, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.”

That’s poisonous, even if, as the article points out, some of the damaging information comes out in other sub-articles not found on the main page, where most children go to learn about a subject. Sanger traces the fall of Wikipedia, to the point today, where “Wikipedia started getting rid of citations from conservative sources, ‘even conservative sources that were cited in order to explain the conservative point of view.’” 

Garland Heralds Return of the Obama Justice Department — Radical as Ever By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/garland-heralds-return-of-the-obama-justice-department-radical-as-ever/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate.

I t appears that the Justice Department under soon-to-be attorney general Merrick Garland will be the Biden administration in microcosm. Judge Garland, like President Biden, is the “pragmatic moderate” sign you hang on the front door, to give mainstream America confidence that the woke Left is not running the asylum. On paper, Garland, like Biden, has the right credentials for that job. When you observe him up close, though, as we had a chance to do during his confirmation hearing this week, that confidence takes a big hit.

Naturally, it’s important to set expectations accurately. This is a left-wing Democratic administration. Even if Garland were as advertised, you are out of luck if you were expecting a constitutionalist Justice Department, one that is solidly pro–law enforcement, deferential to individual liberty, and committed to equal protection under the law.

Biden is not so much presiding over Obama’s third term as he is the doddering passenger riding in first class while Obama’s faithful pilots navigate. Democrats did not yearn for a President Biden; they yearned to beat President Trump and restore the status quo ante. Biden’s job is to give his people what they want: Obama policy and practice.

Consequently, this Justice Department is going to be political and racialist. Garland may not strike you as either of those — in that stealthy way, he’s perfect for the job.

The judge emphasized that his top priority is domestic terrorism. But not all domestic terrorism. It is domestic terrorism as Democrats are defining it — viz., white supremacism, as instantiated by the rioting at the Capitol on January 6.

Was COVID-19 Our Neutron Bomb?By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/28/was-covid-19-our-neutron-bomb/

In the 1970s and 1980s, furor arose over our possible use of the “neutron bomb” that macabrely would “kill people, but not destroy property.” The logic of the perverse weapon was that on allied and friendly European ground, outnumbered defensive NATO troops might radiate and destroy invading masses of Soviet armored troops by periodic detonations of low-yield thermonuclear shells, rockets, and bombs. 

The ensuing blasts of heat would sear flesh, but would lack commensurate repercussion power to destroy most structures and buildings, and leave far smaller toxic radiation trails. In eerie Strangelovian terms, once the enemy was finished off, returning friendly troops and populations could sort their way among the mass dead to find their infrastructure intact—without “collateral” damage or fear of serious radiation sickness. 

In some ways, COVID-19 was our neutron bomb. When we reach the now politically incorrect, taboo term “herd immunity” through vaccinations and antibodies, and when the virus ceases to be a pandemic, the lethal tally may have exceeded 600,000 Americans. 

If so, the nation will have lost more countrymen than were killed in World War I and World War II combined—with thousands more suffering disabilities, from “long haul Covid” to stress and psychological impairment from losing livelihoods and lockdown cabin fever. 

Americans have additionally suffered likely over $15 trillion or so in economic damage from the lockdowns, lost labor, soaring healthcare costs, and the silent killers of substance, familial, and spousal abuse, along with missed medical procedures and surgeries, aborted K-12 schooling, depression, and suicides. It will take years and millions of hours of scholarship to tally all the losses and damage. 

Biden Lied And 105,334 People Died

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/01/biden-lied-and-105334-people-died/

” Biden deserves none of the credit for the gains we’ve made against COVID-19 since he took office. But if he wants to blame Trump for every virus death that happened before Jan. 20, he should take the blame for every one that’s happened since.”

During one of his presidential debates last year when about 220,000 people had died from COVID-19, Joe Biden said that “anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.” So should Joe be looking for another job, now that more than 100,000 have died in just the two months that he’s been president?

Biden said, after all, that he had a plan on “day one” as president to tackle the disease. He was going to move “heaven and earth” to save lives, etc., etc. But since Jan. 20, there have been 105,334 deaths attributed to the coronavirus as of Saturday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. That means that one-fifth of all the COVID-19 deaths have occurred just since Biden took office.

Now Biden is busy casting blame for why the disease continues to claim lives, while repeatedly lying about what he inherited from President Donald Trump in order to make his own efforts seem more heroic.

On Thursday, Biden again claimed that he inherited no vaccination plan when he came into office.

“Were moving in the right direction,” he said, “despite the mess we inherited from the previous administration, which left us with no real plan to vaccinate all Americans.”

It’s been a constant refrain of his administration.

Voting Rights at the Supreme Court The Justices have a rare chance to clarify federal election law.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voting-rights-at-the-supreme-court-11614553224?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Election laws have become a dangerous political flashpoint, as Americans recently learned the hard way. On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear a potentially landmark case (Brnovich v. DNC) that offers an opportunity to restore the Voting Rights Act to its original purpose.

At issue is Arizona’s requirement that voters cast ballots on election day in their assigned precinct and its ban on ballot harvesting by outside groups. A majority of states require in-precinct voting, and 20 or so limit ballot harvesting, which allows third parties to collect ballots in bunches. Both rules are intended to bolster ballot integrity.

Democrats say this violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits states from adopting voting qualifications, standards, or practices that result in “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote “on account of race or color.” But they provide no evidence that Arizona’s rules limit minorities’ ballot access.

Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to stop states from disenfranchising blacks with underhanded methods like poll taxes and literacy tests. But Democrats now argue that any state regulation that makes it a little harder for anyone to vote violates the law—even if it applies equally to minorities and whites.

Rachel, Rachel Is this the world’s most unsalutary health official? Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/rachel-rachel-bruce-bawer/

If you consult the mainstream news media on a regular basis, you’ve probably heard that last Thursday was a red-letter day in American history – an occasion for dancing in the streets from Bangor to Burbank, and for socially distanced champagne toasts from Key West to Ketchikan. Why? Because, for the first time ever, a transgender nominee for a government office was up for Senate confirmation. That nominee was Dr. Rachel Levine, President Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary for Health.

Is Rachel a great, or even a competent, physician? Who cares? It’s 2021, and Rachel is trans!

Rachel’s birth name was Richard, though there’s no way you could tell that from, say, Wikipedia. (In fact, on the “talk” page for Rachel’s Wikipedia entry, you can see anxious contributors earnestly debating how to deal with the ticklish fact that Rachel had a bar mitzvah, not a bas mitzvah.) Now aged 63, Rachel transitioned a decade ago and was divorced a couple of years later. Neither Rachel’s ex nor their two children appear to have attended the hearing.

Importantly, Rachel is not only a trans person; Rachel is a trans activist, a self-described champion of transgender youth. Meaning what? Meaning, among much else, that Rachel supports giving puberty blockers to children who say they’re the opposite sex, and is open to ordering “gender-confirmation” surgery to kids under age 18 with or without parental permission.

Rachel’s last job was as Health Commissioner in Pennsylvania. There were national headlines when it emerged that Rachel’s mother had been removed for her safety from a care home even as Rachel was ordering elderly hospital patients who’d tested positive for COVID back into nursing homes. Like Andrew Cuomo’s similar move in New York, this action doubtless contributed to the state’s elevated toll of COVID deaths in such establishments – a matter that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) brought up at the hearing.

But hey, Rachel is trans!

Because Rachel’s appointment broke a glass ceiling, the Democrats treated the hearing as a celebration. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) had to spoil the party. Noting Rachel’s support for puberty blockers and the “surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia,” Sen. Paul, who is a physician, pointed out that genital mutilation is internationally considered “a violation of human rights” and that “80 to 95% of prepubertal children with gender dysphoria” snap out of it “by late adolescence” if left alone. This being the case, asked Sen. Paul, “do you believe that minors are capable of making such a life-changing decision as changing one’s sex?”

Biden’s Latest Verbal Slip Might Be His Most Disturbing Yet By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/28/bidens-latest-verbal-slip-might-be-his-most-disturbing-yet-n1428963

Conservative media has been calling out Joe Biden’s cognitive decline for a long time. During the presidential campaign, we were the ones sounding the alarm bells while the mainstream media covered for him. At times it was amusing, yet also a bit scary. This man is running for president? The most powerful position in the world?

Now, it’s just scary.

On Saturday, Joe Biden did it again. While attempting to list off the names of several Democrats, even he was surprised by his own forgetfulness.

“… and Representatives Shir-Shirley Jackson Lee, Al Greene, Sylvia Garcia, Lizzie Penelley, ugh, uh, excuse me, Pannill, and, ugh, what am I doing here? I’m gonna lose track here,” Biden wondered aloud. Her name is Sheila Jackson Lee… and she’s hardly forgettable. But his remark, “What am I doing here?” was very telling. Of course, we’ve all been wondering that for weeks. What is Joe Biden doing there in the most powerful position in the world?

Okay, obviously he wasn’t referring to the presidency there, but still, that off-hand remark was a stunning admission from Biden himself that he was aware of his scattered mind.

Citing Wikipedia’s capture by the left, site’s co-founder launching free-speech-friendly competitor Larry Sanger blasts increasingly woke Wikipedia’s whitewashing of socialist and communist human rights atrocities as “propaganda.”

https://justthenews.com/nation/technology/wikipedia-co-founder-launching-competitor-website-upset-about-pro-socialism

A co-founder of Wikipedia is launching a competing website as a free-speech-friendly alternative to what he views as the increasingly monolithic left-wing bias of his former organization.

Last May, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger wrote an op-ed on his personal website titled “Wikipedia is Badly Biased” claiming that Wikipedia’s neutrality policy — known as  “NPOV,” or neutral point of view — “is dead.”

Now, when schoolchildren visit the Wikipedia website to look up answers to questions about the meaning of socialism, “they’re going to find an explanation that completely ignores any conservative, libertarian, or critical treatment of the subject,” Sanger told “Just the News AM” television program. “And that’s really problematic. That’s not education. That’s propaganda.” 

Sanger referred to a Fox News report last week by Maxim Lott, which noted, “The two main pages for ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ span a massive 28,000 words, and yet they contain no discussion of the genocides committed by socialist and communist regimes, in which tens of millions of people were murdered and starved.”

Wikipedia’s socialism page claims, “The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century,” Lott reported, but it “ignores a man-made famine in which Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin commandeered the food from regions like Ukraine and Kazakhstan, leaving millions to starve to death even as the Soviet Union exported grain to foreign countries.”

The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/the-worlds-largest-bookstore-gets-into-the-censorship-business/

Amazon’s decision to remove Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally isn’t about a P.C. company removing one book—it is a challenge to the fundamental principles underlying American democracy.

Just a week ago, I received an email from Ryan Anderson, who was recently tapped to lead the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and who wrote When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment for me at Encounter Books back in 2018. A reader who had tried to order his book from Amazon reported he was unable to find the book listed on the site. I looked myself and, yes, that reader was correct. Other books by Anderson are listed, as are various books on the “transgender” phenomenon, including a now out-of-print title that purports to rebut When Harry Became Sally. But the book itself is nowhere to be found. 

How odd. The book was controversial when it was first published—the New York Times devoted not one but two columns to abusing it. But it sold well and, outside the precincts of wokedom, it was regarded as what it is: a thoughtful, compassionate, and well-researched discussion of the devastating psychological costs of embracing the latest fad of sexual exoticism. 

What happened? Was it an accident? A little digging showed that, like the Earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” It was not just that a book that had been listed and sold by Amazon for the last three years was “out of stock” or “unavailable.” It had disappeared without a trace, more or less like Nikolai Yezhov standing next to Josef Stalin in that notorious photo by the Moscow Canal. One day he is seen smiling next to the great leader. The next day he is gone, airbrushed from history.

So it was with When Harry Became Sally. Amazon had pushed it into the oubliette; the book was gone, “canceled” by the wardens of wokeness at Amazon. Further inquiries show that it was also gone from the Kindle store and from Audible, the audiobooks emporium that is owned by Amazon. As of this writing, the book is still available at Barnes and Noble and other emporia, including at the Encounter Books website.

IS BIDEN’S $1.9 TRILLION COVID “RELIEF” PACKAGE TOO MUCH? Critics call it Biden-Bucks.

https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=2cf2a73e6220e59e3c1c4a60c&id=7845deb81f

It’s a legalized money laundering scheme.

It’s all legal and that’s the scandal.

Our report, Federal Funding of Fortune 100 Companies, drags this scheme into the sunshine.

It shows conclusive evidence that, over a four year period, Fortune 100 companies spent $2 billion lobbying Congress and received over $400 billion in federal grants and contracts — funded by the American taxpayer.

It’s no wonder that when new members show-up in Congress,  they quickly stop representing their constituents’ values. 

Their vote has been won by a higher bidder.

Our reporting on this critical subject has raised heads in the media, with features in the Washington Times, the Associated Press, C-SPAN, One America News, Newsweek, and The Daily Caller. 

The time is ripe for a bipartisan policy change. Remember, it’s YOUR money.