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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The Coronavirus Numbers Are Not Quite What They Seem Henry Miller

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/the-coronavirus-numbers-are-not-quite-what-they-seem/

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, was the founding director of the Office of Biotechnology at the FDA.

The purpose of this slightly pedantic discussion is not to minimize the significance of the new coronavirus, but rather to put into perspective some of the media’s warnings of apocalypse.

Fractions are taught in elementary school, but adults sometimes still manage to misunderstand how they work in everyday life. I was reminded of that after President Trump’s Saturday press conference, which focused on the federal government’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus (formally SARS-CoV-2, with the illness it causes designated COVID-19). Let me explain.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the articulate, veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described at the presser how the efforts to prevent the spread—or “contain” the virus—would continue, but warned that we should expect the number of coronavirus cases in the United States to increase.

Fauci emphasized that the chance of becoming infected remains low and that the majority of those who contract the virus—75 to 80 percent—will experience it like a “bad flu or a cold.” The other 15 to 20 percent, he said, may need “advanced medical care.”

Elections New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/new-impeachment-rules-would-snare-obama/

Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause.

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms. 

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico. 

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

Dir Fauci’s welcome sobriety on corona/COVID-19, which “may ultimately be more akin to a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)”

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1234166783516585984

THANKS TO DR. ANDREW BOSTOM, M.D.

NIAID Dir Fauci’s welcome sobriety on corona/COVID-19, which “may ultimately be more akin to a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)” [published by the ideologically Left, NEJM, no less!] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

The latest threat to global health is the ongoing outbreak of the respiratory disease that was recently given the name Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19). Covid-19 was recognized in December 2019.1 It was rapidly shown to be caused by a novel coronavirus that is structurally related to the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). As in two preceding instances of emergence of coronavirus disease in the past 18 years2 — SARS (2002 and 2003) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) (2012 to the present) — the Covid-19 outbreak has posed critical challenges for the public health, research, and medical communities.

In their Journal article, Li and colleagues3 provide a detailed clinical and epidemiologic description of the first 425 cases reported in the epicenter of the outbreak: the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, China. Although this information is critical in informing the appropriate response to this outbreak, as the authors point out, the study faces the limitation associated with reporting in real time the evolution of an emerging pathogen in its earliest stages. Nonetheless, a degree of clarity is emerging from this report. The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza); 56% of the patients were male. Of note, there were no cases in children younger than 15 years of age. Either children are less likely to become infected, which would have important epidemiologic implications, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection, which has implications for the size of the denominator of total community infections.

America Has a Con Woman in Congress—Where’s the Law? Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/29/america-has-a-con-woman

To date, these are the facts on the fraud alleged to have been committed by a member of the U.S. Congress. Yet nobody is likely to do more than mutter at the striking absence of scruples in Ilhan Omar.

The FBI, which Americans are meant to trust with matters of life and death, is unable—or unwilling—to confirm whether U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) perpetrated fraud by marrying her brother, Ahmed Elmi, to let him obtain a coveted green card, thus granting him permanent-resident status in the United States, and a path to citizenship. But the bureau is reportedly “investigating.”

Conversely, the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, had little difficulty gathering a critical mass of facts, enough to conclude that, in 2009, Omar did indeed secretly wed said sibling. The newspaper, and anyone else suggesting the same, has yet to be sued by Omar. Could the story be true?

As it happens, a Somali community leader has also outed Ilhan Omar as an outlaw. Abdihaikm Osman Nur contends that the Somali-born freshman congresswoman “had indeed married her brother.” So reported Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Despite “a lack of paperwork in war-torn Somalia,” which complicates an investigation and a definitive determination, the British tabloid dug up the requisite information that the FBI has yet to release. The young man whom Omar is alleged to have married certainly bears a remarkable resemblance to the congresswoman. They’re both . . . pretty (although Elmi looks happier and a lot more festive).

Democrats escalate the lies they’re throwing at Trump about coronavirus By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/democrats_escalate_the_lies_theyre_throwing_at_trump_about_coronavirus.html

With the rise of coronavirus, the Democrats are so desperate to destroy Trump that they’re lying about everything possible, celebrating damage to the American economy, and working hard to drive ordinary Americans into a blind panic. This is an unusually sordid display of partisanship over country, although none of them have the grace to be ashamed. A look at Obama’s presidency reveals that the Democrats’ standards were quite different back then.

To set the stage, here are a few indisputable facts:

On January 31, 2020, as China confirmed that 259 people had died and there were about 100 cases reported outside of China, President Trump ordered that the U.S. would prevent foreign nationals who had recently visited China from entering the country. He also ordered quarantined American travelers who posed a high risk.  

Democrats called Trump a racist.

Democrats were worried that Trump’s germ phobia would make him issue even more and worse racist orders.

President Trump held a press conference during which (1) he was surrounded by government scientists who explained what was going on (2) he appointed Vice President Pence, a competent, experienced administrator, to be the White House point person on coronavirus efforts.

Democrats called Pence a killer.

Democrats also announced that henceforth they would call coronavirus “TrumpVirus” because Trump had appointed Pence to oversee the administrative end of dealing with coronavirus and because Trump said there was no need for panic.

Nancy Pelosi complained that Trump had waited too long to act, even though when she spoke not a single American had died.

10,600 CDC Employees Earn $1.1 Billion Annually Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/02/29/10600-cdc-employees-

With the stock market in correction, public health alerts, travel restrictions, and hot spot quarantines across the globe, the coronavirus has certainly captured public attention.

Taxpayers are rightly wondering if the billions of dollars they send to Washington every year will help keep them and their families safe.

The U.S. agency primarily responsible is the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a sub-agency of U.S. Health and Human Services. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that the CDC invested heavily in acquiring and keeping talent. Headcounts and compensation are at all-time highs in nominal terms.

So, can this elite group of doctors and healthcare professionals safeguard the health of the nation?

In 2018, the agency employed 10,639 staffers who earned $1.1 billion. The average pay was $106,000 — with doctors earning up to $288,653. The statistics are compiled from the last year available with analysis by our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

Fact-Check: Obama Waited Until ‘Millions’ Infected and 1000 Dead in U.S. Before Declaring H1N1 Emergency

https://pjmedia.com/trending/fact-check-obama-waited-until-millions-infected-and-1000-dead-in-u-s-before-declaring-h1n1-emergency/

“Let’s call it Trumpvirus,” urged a New York Times opinion writer conspiratorially. Nancy Pelosi groused that President Trump waited too long to attack the coronavirus (COVID-19) and then impetuously declared he couldn’t have leftover and unspent Ebola virus money to fight it, while Senator Chuck Schumer looked down his nose and over his glasses to intone that it was the end of the world and the president hadn’t spent enough money to stop the scourge. Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg have both been called out for politicizing the virus.

By their lights, Trump’s doing it all wrong. They won’t be able to tell you why, but (stomps foot) they just know. They’re praying for a pandemic filled with infected people and decimation of the stock market just to fix Trump’s wagon in his re-election campaign, now that the whole Russian-secret-agent and peeing-hooker story went belly-up.

They just know that he’s such a dummy that it wouldn’t ever occur to him to stop air travel from an infected nation, increase screenings, involuntarily quarantine those infected with the virus when they were repatriated and seek a vaccine now.

Oh, wait, he has done all of those things and was called a racist for doing it.

We’ve had several creepy viruses emerge over the past two decades. There’s been MRSA, SARS, and H1N1 (swine flu), to name a few. But it’s been the H1N1 flu that has been most compared to this outbreak.

Surely, St. Barack of Obama would have dealt with this horrible pandemic better than Orange Man Bad, right? No-Drama-Obama had this whole thing under control, of course!

Well, let’s compare and contrast.

Has Trump Helped Women? Let Me Count the Ways By Mary Vought –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/29/has_trump_helped_women_let_me_count_the_ways.html

Last month, radical leftists held their annual Women’s March in Washington. They claim the Trump administration doesn’t represent women, but the facts indicate otherwise. In reality, women have benefited from huge gains, financial and otherwise, during the past three years.

Take the most important issue for families: The economy. Our nation has created more than 7 million jobs since the 2016 election — and women have filled over half, or more than 4 million, of those vacancies. The unemployment rate for women stands at a minuscule 3.2%, and last September reached its lowest level since 1953. And as the unemployment rate has declined, so too did the number of women in poverty, decreasing by 1.5 million in President Trump’s first two years in office. 

Likewise, President Trump and his administration continue to work to improve our health care system. As the mother of two young daughters, one of whom suffers from cystic fibrosis, I know that Donald Trump is fighting to help the sickest among us. That’s why the  administration recently released a series of regulations that could lead to 28,000 new organ transplants every year, not only saving lives but also, saving up to $13 billion in taxpayer funds over five years.

Efforts like the organ donation rules don’t win much press, but they show how the president is committed to reform health care. His administration has approved record numbers of generic drugs, making once costly prescriptions more affordable for patients. Individuals also have new ways to achieve portable health insurance coverage, providing them with additional and better coverage options to choose from.

Democratic Majority for Israel Waves the White Flag in Presidential Contest Joshua Sharf

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/28/democratic-majority-for-israel-waves-the-white-flag-in-presidential-contest/

Jewish Democrats have let their distaste for Donald Trump warp American Jewish organizations’ responses to his overwhelmingly pro-Israel presidency. They have acted in the interests of partisanship over the people whose interests they are supposed to represent.

Word is that the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) is waving the white flag in the presidential race, will spend no more money on it, and will not endorse a candidate. DMFI had been running ads against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

Democratic Majority for Israel does not intend to run any more televised ads against Sen. Bernie Sanders . . . beyond the Nevada caucuses on Saturday, DMFI CEO Mark Mellman confirmed to Jewish Insider. “We don’t have plans to be further involved in the presidential race—against Sanders or anyone else, for that matter,” Mellman told a gathering in New York City earlier this week.

Instead, the group will focus on down-ticket races, supporting pro-Israel Democrats in the primaries and general election.

It’s hard to overstate how bad this news is for those who want a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. And given that anti-Zionist is usually only a thin disguise for broader Jew-hatred, it’s hard to overstate how bad this news is for American Jewry.

14 Crucial Questions That Bernie Sanders Surrogate Ilhan Omar Won’t Answer Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/28/14-crucial-questions-that-bernie-sanders-surrog

If Ilhan Omar is who Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders entrusts with Minnesota in 2020, America deserves a response to these burning questions about her past.

Freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is perhaps best known for her antisemitic rhetoric, radically left-wing policy, and mounting allegations that she committed marriage and immigration fraud.

But as I argue in my new book, “American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party,” the sensational aspects of Omar’s story belie the fact that she is not only one of the most prominent symbols of the Democratic Party’s ascendant far-left base, but a powerful player in her own right. Her collusion with Islamist adversaries foreign and domestic, and alleged criminality and proven corruption, should send chills down the spines of Americans.

Ilhan Omar Is a Significant Democratic Player

Omar’s clout was demonstrated most recently when Democratic presidential front-runner Bernie Sanders tabbed her campaign co-chair in the all-important 2020 state of Minnesota. The congresswoman also recently introduced a battery of bills concerning foreign policy that senior Obama National Security Council official Ben Rhodes characterized as the “new progressive baseline.”

Lest we forget, this is a House member who, in spite of her known virulent antisemitism, blame America first positions, and potentially compromising background, retains a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which grapples with the most sensitive national security and foreign policy information and issues.

The party signaled a willingness to allow her to act with impunity, effectively condoning her rhetoric and behavior by refusing to censure her by name for her comments, specifically regarding the so-called Israel lobby, and her invocation of other antisemitic tropes.

Omar’s symbolic and substantive significance is summarized simply in the reality that a vote for Sanders is a vote for Omar and their shared agenda of socialism at home and submission abroad. Yet she has faced almost zero media scrutiny. She and her supporters attack as bigots the few who dare pursue her story. But it would be bigoted to treat her differently from any other politician on the basis of her identity traits.

In writing “American Ingrate,” I sought answers to some of the most vexing yet basic issues about Omar’s background, positions, and associations. I delivered a list of questions via email first to Omar’s chief communications staffer in September 2019, then to her general press account in December 2019, and again in February 2020 following the release of “American Ingrate.” Neither Omar nor her office ever responded.

Omar Should Answer These Questions