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The dam breaks, and key Dems run away from Biden ’24 Byron York

Posted By on August 4th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-dam-breaks-and-key-dems-run-away-from-biden-24

You’ve seen the polls showing that large majorities of Democratic voters want the party to pick a new nominee for president in 2024, bypassing incumbent President Joe Biden. Now we’re seeing the living embodiment of those polls as some important Democratic lawmakers distance themselves from, or outright oppose, a reelection run by the nearly 80-year-old president.

It’s not that senior Democrats are eager to disparage a president of their own party. They’re not. Instead, they’re being forced into it by the process of the 2022 campaign, in which they are trying to assure their own reelections. They’re campaigning, doing interviews, and taking part in debates, and the question comes up.

Start with Reps. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN). Last week, Phillips appeared on radio station WCCO, where host Chad Hartman asked him outright: “Do you want Joe Biden to run in 2024? Because the number of Democrats who don’t is staggeringly high.”

Phillips began with obligatory praise of the president — any Democrat who wants Biden to leave has to say how many excellent qualities Biden has. “I have respect for Joe Biden,” Phillips said. “I think he has — despite some mistakes and some missteps, despite his age, I think he’s a man of decency, of good principle, of compassion, of empathy, and of strength.” And then: “But to answer your question directly, which I know is quite rare, uh no, I don’t. I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats to step up.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SERVANT OF THE CORRUPT: PEDRO GONZALEZ

Posted By on August 4th, 2022

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/07/22/servant-of-the-corrupt/

Pedro Gonzalez details the connections among Zelensky, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and Washington, D.C.

In February 2021, by order of President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine shut down three domestic television channels, accusing them of spreading Russian “propaganda.”

Three months later, Zelenksky arrested Viktor Medvedchuk, who was at the time leading the second-biggest party in Ukraine’s national parliament, the pro-Russia and Eurosceptic Opposition Platform for Life (OPZZh).

Zelensky didn’t have trouble incinerating vaunted democratic norms well-before Russia crossed the Rubicon into Ukraine this year. So it was no surprise when he did it again amid the war in late March, invoking emergency powers under martial law to nationalize TV channels and ban 11 opposition parties, including OPZZh — all supposedly done in the name of combatting Russian misinformation and Russian sympathizers, even though OPZZh’s then-chairman, Yuriy Boyko, denounced the war and called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.

Zelensky, however, wouldn’t miss another opportunity to clip the wings of political opposition in his country, certainly not now that Western media rationalizes and glorifies his every move.

The portrait of the Ukraine president as a democratic paragon whitewashes the real Zelensky and conceals a vast web of corruption and international skullduggery of which Ukraine is situated in the center.

Understanding the real Zelensky, requires seeing him as a creation of Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. He is, in truth, a puppet of intrigue.

The Pandora Papers

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It might be hard to believe now, but revelations from documents in the Pandora Papers — millions of file from offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world — sent Zelensky reeling last year, threatening to end his political career. Though the actor-turned-politico campaigned as an anti-corruption reformer, the Pandora Papers showed him to be just as crooked as his predecessors.

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SchumerCare and Cancer Patients Drug price controls will create perverse treatment incentives.

Posted By on August 4th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumercare-and-cancer-patients-joe-manchin-chuck-schumer-drug-pricing-deal-richard-gonzalez-abbvie-11659464967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Much of the damage from the Schumer-Manchin drug pricing deal won’t become visible for years. But people who understand the industry can already foresee it, and one example is fewer treatment options for desperately ill cancer patients.

The mooted bill would empower the secretary of Health and Human Services to “negotiate” Medicare drug prices. “They have full latitude to basically decide whatever price they want the drug to be,” AbbVie CEO Richard Gonzalez said Friday on an earnings call. “It’s not a negotiation. We should just call it what it is. It’s price controls.”

Here’s how it would work: The HHS secretary would select 10 to 20 of the top Medicare spending drugs each year. Drug makers that don’t accept the government’s price would get hit with a 95% penalty on their sales. Small-molecule drugs would get a nine-year reprieve starting when the Food and Drug Administration grants approval.

This latter stipulation is intended to soften the blow to innovation, but it could result in patients waiting longer for potentially life-saving treatments. Take experimental cancer treatments, which regulators typically require that drug makers test first on patients who haven’t benefited from existing treatments.

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Our Golden Age of Galloping Hypocrisy-Declan Mansfield

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/08/our-golden-age-of-galloping-hypocrisy/

One of life’s perverse pleasures is logging into social media and observing the panoply of human delusion and hypocrisy. It’s extraordinary what people post on the internet. No virtue is too big to signal. No delusion is too small to share.

It’s not just that people cannot determine fact from fiction; or the widespread inability to recognise good sources of information from nonsense. It’s that a collective amnesia garbles minds as soon as they turn on a computer. Suddenly, nobody can remember their past or their present. Everyone forgets that they could give a university lecture on selfishness, not because they’ve studied the psychology of human greed, but because they’ve seldom rejected an opportunity to indulge their selfish desires. I know I haven’t.

And the bigger the vice, the bigger the delusion and hypocrisy. I’ve known women whose underwear would self destruct at the sight of a rich guy in a sports car but who lecture everyone online about equality. I’ve known men who have never met a woman they didn’t want to have sex with, the sort who make sheep nervous just by driving past a field, and who pose as paragons of sexual propriety on Facebook. It’s mass delusion on an epic scale and it’s one of the defining features of our age.

Hypocrisy is always with us, but something different and more virulent has become the norm. Principles no longer matter. Uttering feel-good platitudes is an end in itself and the appearance of virtue is now synonymous with being virtuous. To appear good, post some dim-witted platitude on social media and wallow in the glow of being virtuous and of being an intellectual, because intelligent people, of course, are all of one mind. The hard decisions that people must make to survive, which inevitably create resentment, and which are impossible to avoid, are smoothed over or ignored. This widespread hypocrisy grants a license to the badly behaved to excuse their own behaviour. Everything is permitted to create a virtuous persona. How many times have you exclaimed out loud while reading social media: ‘you are saying that; really, you, of all people, are posting that on Facebook with a straight face’.

The list is endless.

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Palestinians Commit Suicide as Their Leaders Live in Hotels and Villas by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18763/gaza-suicide-hamas

Many residents of the Gaza Strip undoubtedly regret the day they voted for Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election.

The last protest, which took place in 2017 under the slogan “We Want to Live!”, was brutally crushed by Hamas’s security forces and armed militias.

“In all countries of the world, you pay taxes for the services that the state provides you, except for us. In return, there are no hospitals, no education, no electricity, no water, no public utilities, not even rodent control.” — Khalil Talmas, Gaza Strip resident, Facebook, July 27, 2022.

“‘We Want to Live!’… is a cry of pain from the depths of a crushed and exhausted Palestinian people. It is a cry against taxes, extortion, repression and corruption.” — Anas Al-Jazzar, Twitter, July 28, 2022.

Other Palestinians said that the current protest was directed not only against Hamas, but also against the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank….

These Palestinians pointed out the corrupt leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and their family members are leading comfortable lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and in five-star hotels and big villas in Qatar and Turkey, while most people were living in poverty and unemployment and misery.

“So the [Hamas] leaders’ families, their children, grandchildren do not believe in their own [political and military] project, and although they can live in Gaza in the utmost luxury, they choose to leave it for the hotels and villas of Doha and Istanbul. They left the hungry people of Gaza to live in poverty, deprivation and hunger.” — Mohammed Nashwan, Gaza Strip resident, alarab.co.uk, July 21, 2022.

[T]hese voices offer a glimmer of hope that the Palestinians are finally beginning to realize that their corrupt and incompetent leaders — whether in the Palestinian Authority or Hamas — are continuing to lead them from one disaster to another, while depriving them of the international aid that is rightly theirs and denying them a decent life.

It has been 15 years since the Islamist Hamas group seized control of the Gaza Strip, home to some two million Palestinians. Since then, the residents of the Gaza Strip have been reminded on a daily basis of the failure of the Iranian-backed group to provide them with decent living conditions.

Instead, the repressive governance of the Hamas leaders only brings the Palestinians in Gaza more misery.

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The Point of No Return: Thomas Sowell

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2022/08/03/the-point-of-no-return-n2611153

This is an election year. But the issues this year are not about Democrats and Republicans. The big issue is whether this nation has degenerated to a point of no return — a point where we risk destroying ourselves, before our enemies can destroy us.

If there is one moment that symbolized our degeneration, it was when an enraged mob gathered in front of the Supreme Court and a leader of the United States Senate shouted threats against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, saying “You won’t know what hit you!”

There have always been irresponsible demagogues. But there was once a time when anyone who shouted threats to a Supreme Court Justice would see the end of his own political career, and could not show his face in decent society again.

You either believe in laws or you believe in mob rule. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the law or agree with the mob on some particular issue. If threats of violence against judges — and publishing where a judge’s children go to school — is the way to settle issues, then there is not much point in having elections or laws.

There is also not much point in expecting to have freedom. Threats and violence were the way the Nazis came to power in Germany. Freedom is not free. If you can’t be bothered to vote against storm-trooper tactics — regardless of who engages in them, or over what issue — then you can forfeit your freedom.

Worse yet, you can forfeit the freedom of generations not yet born.

Some people seem to think that the Supreme Court has banned abortions. It has done nothing of the sort.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

TULSI GABBARD ON PUBERTY BLOCKERS FOR CHILDREN

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/02/the-morning-briefing-tulsi-gabbard-is-so-close-to-being-cool-n1617527

Former congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard blasted the Biden administration for promoting puberty blockers for children, which the FDA recently acknowledged can have devastating health impacts on children.

“The FDA made a disturbing, but not at all surprising announcement just a few days ago about children’s health,” Gabbard declared in a video posted to Twitter. “Now, if you haven’t heard about it, or, if you missed it, it is because the mainstream media and the Biden-Harris administration have been completely silent on it. This warning that the FDA issued was basically saying that puberty blockers can cause serious health risks for our kids. Unfortunately, at almost the exact same time the FDA issued this warning, Biden-Harris administration officials were making public statements actively promoting the use of puberty blockers and irreversible surgeries for kids.”

“Now, let’s be clear: this administration is dangerously promoting child abuse,” she added.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Canada: the Country of the Long Wait By David Solway

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/david-solway-2/2022/08/02/canada-the-country-of-the-long-wait-n1617827

A few days ago my wife and I brought her mother, who was suffering from a serious leg infection, to the local ER. We were worried about the possibility of gangrene, which an acquaintance some years back had contracted under similar circumstances, resulting in the amputation of his leg. As expected, the ER was jam-packed, and it soon became clear that my mother-in-law would have to wait at least six and even twelve hours before she could be seen. No triage had been performed to determine rank of urgency. Meanwhile, a youngish man in a wheelchair, doubled over and clutching his chest, was bitterly complaining that he had suffered a heart attack. But he too would have to wait before being attended to — assuming he would still be alive by then.

This is publicly funded “single-payer” Medicare, the pride of the Canadian medical system, though in reality, an institutional atrocity equaled only, perhaps, by the British National Health Service (NHS). Even our doctors are suffering, six having died suddenly within a period of days, apparently following the mandated fourth jab (though the likely cause of death was strenuously and predictably denied by hospital administrations). What are they waiting for, we might ask, to recognize the folly of failed medical policy? After all, the Grim Reaper is no slouch.

Pre-COVID, a hospital was a place where you went to wait. During COVID, a hospital was a place where you went to die. Post-COVID, a hospital is a place, or so it seems, where first you wait and then you die, a phenomenon clinically accentuated in the Canadian system. But whatever the outcome, the long wait is the prerequisite for treatment or responsiveness in this country, not only in medicine, as we will see, but in any domain or department of national life and practice. The medical analogy holds throughout.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Another Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump Will Be Out of a Job Rebecca Downes

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2022/08/03/peter-meijer-primary-race-n2611107

Yet another Republican House member who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump lost his primary. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Decision Desk ultimately called the Republican primary for Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District for John Gibbs at 12:48am EST against Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI). Gibbs was endorsed by Trump.

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All FBI Agents Must Blow Their Whistles Or They’ll Be Complicit In Bureau’s Politicization By: Margot Cleveland

Posted By on August 3rd, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/02/all-fbi-agents-must-blow-their-whistles-or-theyll-be-complicit-in-bureaus-politicization/

What the FBI needs to rehabilitate itself is a cavalcade of whistleblowers exposing the rot within the bureau.

Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office confirmed to The Federalist that the multiple FBI whistleblowers charging misconduct related to the Hunter Biden investigation only came forward in the last two months. While the existence of these new whistleblowers proves promising, other FBI agents with knowledge of misconduct or political bias must stop hiding behind the chain of command and start blowing their own whistles. 

“Multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions” informed the Iowa Republican senator that “Washington Field Office assistant special agent in charge Timothy Thibault and other FBI officials … ‘falsely portray[ed] as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.’”

The whistleblowers further charged that “in August of 2020, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment, which was used by a team of agents at FBI headquarters to improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.” “The FBI headquarters team allegedly placed their assessment findings in a restricted access subfolder, effectively flagging sources and derogatory evidence related to Hunter Biden as disinformation while shielding the justification for such findings from scrutiny,” Grassley revealed.