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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

OctoPelosi House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is also the blessed leader of the Golden State with an unexamined connection to Governor Gavin Newsom. Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/25/octopelosi/

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi turns 80 on Thursday. In the runup to that milestone, Pelosi launched impeachment proceedings against President Trump, who was duly acquitted. By way of follow-up, she decided to block the Senate’s coronavirus response package earlier this week, and on Monday offered a 1,200-page version of her own chock full of goodies meant to keep the Ocasio-Cortez-Tlaib-Omar squad in line.

And behind the scenes, Pelosi is pulling the strings on the Golden State.

“I want to thank Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” said California governor Gavin Newsom in his March 12 press conference telling 40 million Californians to stay home. “We had a very long conversation today. Talk about meeting the moment. We are so blessed to have her leadership in California. She’s very familiar to northern Californians, certainly familiar to me as a former mayor of San Francisco.”

Listeners might not have known the other ways in which Nancy Pelosi is familiar to the governor, whose grandfather, William Newsom, helped Pat Brown win the 1943 race for San Francisco district attorney.

In 1960, with the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, Governor Pat Brown awarded the concession to William Newsom and John Pelosi. In 1963, John’s son Paul married Nancy D’Alesandro, daughter of congressman and Baltimore mayor Thomas D’Alesandro. In 1969, Paul and Nancy Pelosi moved to San Francisco, where Paul’s brother Ron was a county supervisor. Ron married William Newsom’s daughter Barbara, so Nancy Pelosi was Gavin Newsom’s aunt by marriage until the couple divorced.

Senate Passes Coronavirus Bill, Proving Pelosi Gambled With Americans’ Lives and Lost By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/senate-passes-coronavirus-bill-proving-pelosi-gambled-with-americans-lives-and-lost/

In the wee hours of Wednesday evening, the U.S. Senate finally passed the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill after a great deal of Democrat stalling and a futile effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put forward a separate bill jam-packed with liberal Christmas wish-list items. The bill provides crucial relief to businesses struggling with the social distancing strategy of stopping the spread of the coronavirus. It now heads to the House.

The stimulus bill is far from perfect, but its passage unmasked Pelosi’s tactics as a disgraceful waste of time during this crisis. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) slammed the speaker for her attempt to jam her liberal pipe dreams down Americans’ throats in the midst of a crisis.

“Democrats wanted to use the coronavirus response package to change election law & implement parts of their Green New Deal. The Senate just passed strong bipartisan legislation that scraps those items, & it’s clear. ⇨ Their delay achieved nothing but more pain for Americans,” McCarthy tweeted.

New York Dems Demand Coronavirus Cash for Museum w/$2.9 Billion Endowment Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/03/new-york-dems-demand-coronavirus-cash-museum-w29-daniel-greenfield/

Fear not ladies and sufferers, the Pelosi coronavirus pigout is just getting started.

New York is facing an eruption in coronavirus cases. And what’s on the minds of its Dem delegation? Ventilators, masks? Museums.

“NYC isn’t NYC without our non-profit museums. But if we want our museums to survive COVID-19, we need to protect them NOW. That’s why I led the NYC Congressional delegation with @RepMaloney in calling for $4 billion in emergency funds to equip museums to outlast this pandemic,” Rep Nadler tweeted.

How many ventilators could $4 billion buy? We know the answer to that one.

In 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million.

But why bother. Now it’s time for the pork pigout.

With Lives and the Economy on the Line, Nancy Pelosi Stalls Wuhan Coronavirus Relief Bill By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/with-lives-and-the-economy-on-the-line-nancy-pelosi-stalls-wuhan-coronavirus-relief-bill/

Shameful.Utterly, despicably shameful.

Having tried and failed in the first half of this to lard up the coronavirus relief bill with extraneous goodies and intrusive regulations to please her rabidly progressive constituency, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to take her bat and ball and go home for the day.

We’re in a situation where every day, every hour counts. Every day that passes without a paycheck or unemployment relief is a day untold numbers of families grow closer to losing their homes. Every hour that money doesn’t go out to manufacturers is another hour hospitals have to wait for masks and ventilators. Every hour some sick New Yorker has to wait for another hospital bed. Every dinner out postponed, every canceled event, every missed business opportunity is another step closer to economic collapse.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Congress knows what to do: Pass a clean bill and get it on the President’s desk. Pronto.

Pelosi Reacts to Virus Stimulus Deal, Declines to Say When House Will Vote By Zachary Stieber

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pelosi-reacts-to-virus-stimulus-deal-declines-to-say-when-house-will-vote_3285249.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said staffers and representatives are reviewing the stimulus deal reached in the Senate overnight Tuesday while declining to commit to a vote in the House on Wednesday.

“We have our staff and our chairman reviewing the bill. I’m optimistic but we’ll see,” Pelosi told reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

Asked if the House could vote as early as today, Pelosi said: “No, we haven’t seen the bill yet. The Senate will vote first.”

“We’ll see the bill and see when the Senate votes,” she added. “So there’s no decision about timing until we see the bill.”

The House went into session at 10 a.m. for a brief session before adjourning in less than two minutes. There’s nothing on the schedule until 11 a.m. Thursday.

House Democrats plan to hold several conference calls throughout the day on the deal the Senate reached and plans for voting on the agreement, C-Span’s Craig Caplan reported.

The White House and leaders in the Senate reached a deal on a $2 trillion relief package overnight. The package includes direct payments of up to $3,000 to most American families as well as creating a $367 billion program for small business loans.

“This is a wartime level of investment into our nation,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor after the two sides had reached a deal. “The men and women of the greatest country on Earth are going to defeat this coronavirus and reclaim our future.”

Senators said they plan to vote on the package on Wednesday. The Senate was slated to reconvene at 12 p.m.

Inaccurate Virus Models Are Panicking Officials Into Ill-Advised Lockdowns

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/25/inaccurate-virus-models-are-panicking-officials-into-ill-advised-lockdowns/

As U.S. state and local officials halt the economy and quarantine their communities over the Wuhan virus crisis, one would hope our leaders were making such major decisions based on well-sourced data and statistical analysis. That is not the case.

A scan of statements made by media, state governors, local leaders, county judges, and more show many relying on the same source, an online mapping tool called COVID Act Now. The website says it is “built to enable political leaders to quickly make decisions in their Coronavirus response informed by best available data and modeling.”

An interactive map provides users a catastrophic forecast for each state, should they wait to implement COVID Act Now’s suggested strict measures to “flatten the curve.” But a closer look at how many of COVID Act Now’s predictions have already fallen short, and how they became a ubiquitous resource across the country overnight, suggests something more sinister.

When Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins announced a shelter-in-place order on Dallas County Sunday, he displayed COVID Act Now graphs with predictive outcomes after three months if certain drastic measures are taken. The NBC Dallas affiliate also embedded the COVID Act Now models in their story on the mandate.

US was more prepared for pandemic than any other country, Johns Hopkins study found Greg Re

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-was-most-prepared-country-in-the-world-for-pandemics-johns-hopkins-study-found-in-2019

The United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) — an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The Global Health Security Index was was “developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit” from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. “More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”

At the same time, the paper noted that the U.S. score was still not perfect, and that “factors driving down the U.S. score include the risks of social unrest and terrorism, and low public confidence in government.”

President Trump’s campaign has argued in recent days that misinformation may be one of the leading causes of that lack of confidence. For example, Trump’s team has pointed to claims by presidential contender Joe Biden that “no one on the National Security Council staff was put in charge” of pandemic preparedness, based on a report that in May 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in a reorganization effort.

Abolish the World Health Organization Stephen L. Miller

https://spectator.us/abolish-world-health-organization/

Way back on January 10, the official Twitter account of the World Health Organization declared that ‘WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers to and from Wuhan, #China.’ The tweet went on to say that ‘It is generally considered that entry screening offers little benefit, while requiring considerable resources.’ A follow-up tweet described how ‘WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on #China based on the information currently available.’

What we’ve learned since is that China was by then already engaged in a massive cover-up of the release and spread of the virus. It imprisoned doctors (one of whom would later die from contracting COVID-19) who attempted to warn the World Health Organization and the world.

On January 14, the same Twitter account blasted out that ‘Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China.’

Two wrong tweets shouldn’t call into the question the creditability of the World Health Organization, but the direction in which its director-general, Tedros Adhanom, has steered the WHO, and his unwillingness to diverge from Beijing’s public pronouncements, should trouble the world.

Trump’s Coronavirus Response Is Foiling His Enemies Conrad Black

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/24/trumps-coronavirus-response-is-foiling-his-enemies/

The president is already unlimbering the economic guns and starting to spike the dreams of those who hope that the economic consequences of the anti-coronavirus measures will lose the administration its reelection.

The political aspect of the coronavirus crisis is developing in a familiar way. The president’s enemies in the media have led the propagation of panic in the country, and have been given enough encouragement to do that from the scientific community, some of whose members are enjoying their 15 minutes of world fame a little more than is seemly.

Trump’s opponents are thus able to swaddle themselves in the legitimacy of science as they hurl their brickbats at the president. As is his custom, the president has given his opponents plenty of ammunition by speaking constantly, leaving a rich trove of contradictory, and in some cases, it turns out after a few days, absurd reflections on the medical and related problems as they unfold.

As is also the well-established custom, his enemies cannot resist embellishing and fabricating. The claim he had disbanded the pandemic response section of the National Security Council is false, as are suggestions that he has ignored or overruled scientific opinion.

The assault on the president’s credibility as an enunciator of facts has had some success, partly because there is some reason to question his attention to facts and partly because he is routinely smeared by his media enemies.

Private Industry Mobilizes Against the Coronavirus The feds don’t need to nationalize the economy to fight Covid-19.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-industry-mobilizes-against-the-coronavirus-11585091775?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Trump can’t do right by some critics no matter what he does. For three years he’s been denounced as a reckless authoritarian, and now he’s attacked for not being authoritarian enough by refusing to commandeer American industry. The truth is that private industry is responding to the coronavirus without command and control by the federal government.

Last week Mr. Trump invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act that lets a President during a national emergency order business to manufacture products for national defense, set wage and price controls and allocate materials. On Tuesday the Federal Emergency Management Agency used the Korean War-era law for the first time in this crisis to procure and distribute testing kits and face masks.

But Democrats want the Administration to take over much more of the private economy. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday tweeted that the federal government should “nationalize the medical supply chain” and “order companies to make gowns, masks and gloves.” He has been echoed by Democratic governors and leaders in Congress.

Yet businesses across America are already chipping in where they can. Aerospace manufacturer Honeywell plans to hire 500 workers at its plant in Rhode Island, which currently produces safety goggles, to make millions of N95 face masks for medical professionals. 3M has doubled its global output of N95 masks and this week is sending 500,000 respirators to hot spots in the U.S.