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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Judge Rules Pennsylvania Governor’s Shutdown Orders Unconstitutional By Jack Phillips

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-rules-pennsylvania-governors-shutdown-orders-unconstitutional_

A federal judge has struck down Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s CCP virus restrictions that required people to stay at home, put limits on gatherings, and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to stay shut down.

U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV on Sept. 14 sided with plaintiffs that included drive-in movie theaters, hair salons, farmers markets, and several GOP officials who sued as individuals. Butler, Greene, Fayette, and Washington counties were also listed as plaintiffs.

Stickman’s judgment stipulates that “the congregate gathering limits imposed by defendants’ mitigation orders violate the right of assembly enshrined in the First Amendment,” the “stay-at-home and business closure components of defendants’ orders violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” and “the business closure components of Defendants’ orders violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The judge, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, argued that the actions taken by Wolf and Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine, who are both Democrats, “were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency,” but that “even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered.”

Cotton Announces Bill to Revoke China’s ‘Most Favored Nation’ Status By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cotton-announces-bill-to-revoke-chinas-most-favored-nation-status/

Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) announced Monday that he is introducing legislation to repeal permanent most favored nation trade status, a designation that guarantees equal trading opportunity among a nation’s trade partners.

In an appearance on Fox & Friends, Cotton criticized China’s status as a most favored nation, and said he would introduce legislation this week that would require the president and congress to reassess the status each year.

Under Cotton’s new legislation if China were to “shoot missiles at our ships in the Western Pacific” or crack down on Hong Kong as it has done this year, “then we would be able to say each year we are not going to renew most favored nation status for China,” he said. 

The senator also blasted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for his decades of support of increased trade opportunities with the Chinese Communist Party.

“This week is the twentieth anniversary of Joe Biden voting to give permanent most favored nation status to China,” he said. “Just think about that — most favored nation status to a communist country.”

He said the status had “supercharged the loss of American manufacturing jobs” and criticized the former vice president for defending it last week during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Fire set, bricks thrown in downtown Lancaster after man wielding knife is shot, killed by police

Overnight, Lancaster police released body cam video of the shooting. It shows a man holding a knife, running at police

State Department reported Burisma paid bribe while Hunter Biden served on board, memos show State, DOJ officials reported to FBI concerns Ukraine gas firm made bribe to local prosecutors while under corruption investigation. John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/monamholdstate-dept-feared-burisma-paid-bribe-while

Just eight months after Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter joined the board of Burisma Holdings, U.S. officials in Kiev developed evidence that the Ukrainian gas company may have paid a $7 million bribe to the local prosecutors investigating the firm for corruption, according to interviews and State Department memos.

State officials believed the alleged bribe was paid between May and December 2014 and got confirmation from one prosecutor. They argued the bribe amounted to a “gross miscarriage of justice that undermined months of US assistance” to fight corruption in Ukraine, contemporaneous memos show.

The concerns were eventually reported to the FBI, although it is not clear whether the allegations were ever investigated more fully, according to current and former U.S. and Ukrainian government officials.

The anecdote, buried in five-year-old diplomatic files, provides a fresh illustration of the awkward, uncomfortable conflict of interest State officials perceived as they tried to fight pervasive corruption in Ukraine under Joe Biden’s leadership while the vice president’s son collected large payments as a board member for an energy firm widely viewed as corrupt.

The concerns first came to a head in January 2015, the memos show, about eight months after Hunter Biden was named to Burisma’s board and after two major corruption investigations — one in Ukraine and the other in Britain — were opened against the gas firm.

‘We Hope They Die!’ Black Lives Matter mob blocks emergency room for L.A. County Sheriff’s deputies gunned down Saturday night. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/we-hope-they-die-lloyd-billingsley/

On Saturday night, two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies stationed their patrol car near the Willowbrook Metro station in Compton. At approximately 7 p.m., a masked gunman appeared to walk past the vehicle then turned and fired multiple shots, hitting both deputies.

Fox News Los Angeles reporter Bill Melugin obtain video of the shooting and confirmed a “100 percent ambush. A man slowly creeps up to the vehicle like he’s stalking it, fires shots through the window.” The Sheriff’s department posted the video and Sheriff Alex Villanueva held a press conference wearing a bullet-proof vest.

The ambushed deputies were a 24-year-old male and a mother of 31, both recent additions to the department.  “I want everyone to have a prayer for them for their recovery at this time,” the sheriff told reporters. “This was a cowardly act,” Villanueva said, and “words have consequences,” a reference to anti-police rhetoric now raging in Los Angeles and across the country.

As Villanueva wrapped up, a mob confronted sheriff’s deputies, with one member shouting “It’s a celebration! It’s a celebration!” Others taunted deputies and took videos with their phones. As this played out, the ambush victims encountered other conflict at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood.

A Black Lives Matter mob assembled outside the hospital chanting “Death to police!” The mob blocked entrance to the hospital emergency room, where family members of the wounded officers were present. “I hope they fucking die,” one man yelled, with another adding “Y’all gonna die one by one. This ain’t gonna stop.”

As police struggled to disperse the mob, a woman ignored commands to stay back and interfered with an arrest. Unidentified in some reports, she turned out to be Jodie Huang a reporter for KPCC radio. Huang attended the sheriff’s press conference and did not identify herself as a reporter on arriving at the hospital.

KPCC is part of Southern California Public Radio, which proclaims, “as an organization we condemn systemic racism — and racism of any kind — and remain committed to reflecting the diverse communities we serve. With that in mind, we say the statement “Black Lives Matter” reinforces our commitment.”

In July, Huang tweeted, “Black Lives Matter is a spiritual movement,” and authored a report on a BLM action at the Federal Building in Los Angeles, in solidarity with rioters in Portland.

‘We Hope They Die’ Protesters cheer a shooting ambush of sheriff’s deputies in L.A.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-hope-they-die-11600031160?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

No one other than the shooter is responsible for the gunfire ambush Saturday of two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies as they sat in their patrol car. But the same can’t be said for the protesters who blocked the entrance to the hospital where the two are being treated, and chanted “we hope they die.” The latter is a cultural poison nurtured by the left-wing anti-police movement sweeping the country.

The two deputies were “ambushed by a gunman in a cowardly fashion” in the Compton neighborhood, said Sheriff Alex Villaneuva at a press conference. The deputies hadn’t been identified by name as we write this, but press reports say one is a 31-year-old mother and the other a 24-year-old man. Both have been with the department a little more than a year.

Police haven’t identified a suspect, but the randomness of the ambush suggests someone looking for any available police target. We’ve seen this before when anti-police fever is hot. A gunman shot and killed two officers in their car in New York in 2014 following the death of black suspects being arrested in Ferguson, Mo., and New York.

The protests are worse this year following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the anti-police violence is more widespread. An officer was stabbed in the neck in Flatbush in New York City in an ambush in June. The officer survived.

Ten Great Deceptions Designed to Destroy the Republic Judith Acosta

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/ten_great_deceptions_designed_to_destroy_the_republic.htm

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…I was a Madison Avenue copywriter. I was thrilled, until I realized I was a liar for hire.

I was assigned an ad for a diet aid. The account executive sent out the marketing strategy. When I read it, I felt something akin to an inner eye squint, the feeling you get when you suspect you’re being conned. I realized we were being asked to market this rather dubious product to young, anorexic women by capitalizing on their already-fragile sense of self and lying to them about what the product could be expected to do.  

So I wrote the ad that changed my life. It featured a close-up of the product with the headline “FAT CHANCE.” I was the only one who appreciated the irony.

Ah, well.   

I soon realized that in the sport of marketing (sic: lying) I’d never be a team player and that I’d have to find an honest way to make a living.

Since then, the great spin turbines in Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and D.C. have spawned a culture built on an ever-destabilizing pyramid of lies which cannot support the existence of a republic, the essence of which is self-governance.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the political arena. The other night after the live broadcast of the Republican National Convention, a friend called. She said she had been flipping back and forth from the real-time telecast to CNN and MSNBC. She was irate: “You’d never have known they were speaking about the same show. Everything they said was completely disingenuous, if not bald-faced lies.”

In the last ten years or so it has become increasingly evident that you are are either believing what the left (or the diet pill manufacturer) is saying or you are paying attention to reality.

STOP THE COUP – It’s time to unmask the Revolution.

https://americanmind.org/post/stop-the-coup/

Michael Anton’s new article “The Coming Coup?” went viral almost as soon as we posted it a week ago today. This is not simply because figures like Lara Logan, Mollie Hemingway, Newt Gingrich, Dan Bongino, and the editors of the New York Post took note. It spread because concerned citizens began sharing it throughout the nation. We could tell it was especially effective because so many in the mainstream media maintained studious radio silence.

But hyperventilating ruling-class supporters of the Biden/BLM/Antifa coalition did predictably lash out. The epitome of these reactions is an article in New York magazine’s Intelligencer, by political columnist Ed Kilgore, entitled “Trump Backers Make Case for Stealing Election, Before Biden Gets the Chance.”  

The title itself reveals the stubborn simplicity of the Democratic Party’s coup narrative. Their elites have worked themselves and their base into a frothing lather of existential fright. In article after article, liberal intellectuals and activists have been talking for months about how Trump could steal the election or refuse to leave the White House even if he loses. But if the Right dares to point out that Democrats are actually changing the rules of the electoral process and actually speaking publicly about refusing to concede even if they lose, well, this only proves that the Right is going to steal the election and refuse to concede if they lose!  

In reality, of course, Anton and others are simply trying to shine a light on what Democrats are now openly declaring in public.

 Kilgore frames Anton’s essay as part of an effort among conservatives to spread the craaaazy idea that Democrats’ obsessive focus on mail-in voting is part of a panicky effort to throw the election, not a good-faith scheme to protect people from coronavirus. Let’s leave aside the fact that no less an establishment authority than the Atlantic admits the voting booth is as safe as the grocery store. In fact, says Kilgore, echoing the new establishment narrative, so many legitimate Biden votes may come flooding in by mail after the in-person voting is through that the election will turn around all on its own.   

Two CA Sheriff’s Deputies Ambushed, Shot: ‘Fighting For Their Lives’ By Bryan Preston

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/09/13/breaking-two-ca-sheriffs-deputies-ambushed-shot-fighting-for-their-lives-n924845

ABC7 Los Angeles reports two county deputies — one male, one female — were ambushed and shot while they were sitting in their patrol car Saturday night.

Surveillance video of the shooting shows the suspect ambush the deputies as they sat in the patrol car.

A person clad in dark clothing walks up to the parked vehicle at the Metro station, approaches the window on the passenger’s side and fires several times at close range. The suspect then runs off on foot.

The surveillance video can be viewed here. Warning: Footage of the shooting may be disturbing to some viewers.

The two deputies have been rushed to the hospital and are reported to be “fighting for their lives.”

The surveillance video shows the attack was clearly unprovoked. (WARNING: very disturbing video).

The Religion of Covid By David Solway

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/the_religion_of_covid.html

On the signboard of our local church, all reference to Sunday Service and accompanying Bible texts have vanished. In their place we read the homily: Fewer Faces and Open Spaces, attributed not to the minister Gordon K. Brownmiller, but to British Columbia’s Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry, whose gospel has become definitive. Indeed, Bonnie Henry has become a hero of the people, a font of daily information and a source of comfort, delivered in the dulcet tones of motherly consolation. She is probably the most revered political figure in the province. She is lauded for having the wellbeing of its citizens at heart and does everything she can to soothe anxiety and discomfort, issuing instructions dedicated to public safety, including reminders to wear masks and maintain social distancing. She has become an epidemiological saint and Bonniolatry is all the rage.

And yet, as a high-ranking member of the government, Bonnie had no objection to the massive BLM demonstrations in our two major cities, Vancouver and Kelowna, leading to the predictable surge in Coronavirus cases, which she then disingenuously attributed to people gathering in bars. The glaring discrepancy did not register among her admiring votaries. For Bonnie Henry is an apostle of the Lord and must have her reasons too abstruse for ordinary citizens to apprehend — unless we accept the official canard that “racism” is a bigger virus than COVID and that something called “cultural health” — as the Democrats, following in the footsteps of the American Public Health Association, righteously assert — is far more important than the lives of individual people. In any event, for the people of this province, whatever Bonnie says, goes. She is the voice of God. And what a sweet, assuaging voice it is.

In this theological frame of reference, the virus naturally represents the wrath of the Lord against the denizens of Sodom and Gomorrah — that is, Vancouver and Kelowna — who were at one time indifferent to the gifts of authority and went about their sinful daily lives without a thought for higher things. Some complained about extortionate taxes. Some resented escalating prices. Many drove their vehicles with unprecedented recklessness, a notorious feature of the region, dramatically raising insurance rates. A few were known to go whoring after strange gods and even to vote Conservative. The Lord sent a plague to educate us and dispatched his prophet Bonnie Henry to steer us lovingly back to sacerdotal health, requiring us only to self-isolate, don masks and stay six feet away from one another. Covidianity has now become the new communion.