FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Hole in Biden’s China Strategy: Central Asia Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan could help the U.S. combat Beijing and advance human rights. By Kamran Bokhari

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hole-in-bidens-china-strategy-central-asia-11615934414?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The brewing competition between the U.S. and China is the defining conflict of the 21st century. The White House’s recent Interim National Security Strategic Guidance Document, crafted to convey President Biden’s vision for how America will engage with the world, is all about the U.S. vs. China. Yet it fails to mention the region where America has its lightest footprint on the planet: Central Asia.

China is building a land bridge to Europe and the Middle East that runs through Central Asia. The new administration will have to account for the region in its strategic thinking if it hopes to re-engage the world after four years of President Trump’s “America First” policy.

The low priority that Mr. Biden’s team assigns to Central Asia is a legacy of successive administrations dating to the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union. The U.S. has since engaged Central Asia, but only in a tactical or transactional manner. Take the 2015 establishment of the C5+1. This U.S.-run diplomatic forum has continued to be the channel through which Washington distributes aid to and organizes meetings between the five Central Asian states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. But it hasn’t brought Washington anywhere close to being able to compete with Beijing and Moscow in the region.

Thirty years since the U.S. gained access to Central Asia, long tucked away in the Kremlin’s shadow, it is time to develop a broader strategy for the region—one that takes into consideration the rapidly evolving geopolitics in Eurasia, as Beijing seeks to fill the vacuum created by Russia’s receding influence.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

BIDEN’S SELLOUT TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.creators.com/read/daily-editorials/03/21/has-joe-biden-sold-america-out-to-the-mexican-drug-cartels-f3261#increaseFont

I told you so. It’s become crystal clear I was right on the money. I’ve said for two years now on my national radio show that the best thing that could ever happen for the Mexican drug cartels would be a Democratic presidential victory.

Mexican drug kingpins have waited their entire lives for this fantasy. They must be singing, dancing and toasting champagne right now, because President Joe Biden is the greatest gift ever bestowed upon the Mexican cartels.

Experts estimated the money made on drug trafficking by the cartels at around $500 billion a year. That’s half a trillion dollars a year — “trillion” with a T.

Who quotes that figure? Republican senators. See what Georgia Sen. David Purdue said in 2019: “At half a trillion dollars — $500 billion — that makes the cartel business and the drug traffic just in Mexico alone coming across to the United States bigger than Walmart, to put it in perspective. So this is larger than our largest companies.”

But that figure is bipartisan. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein quotes a figure in a similar range: “The illicit drug trade is a business, valued at anywhere between $426 and $652 billion.”

That was all before Joe Biden’s lax open-borders policies.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Georgia Judge Indicates Absentee Ballots Could be Unsealed for Investigation into Potential Fraud Reagan McCarthy Reagan McCarthy

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/03/16/loeffler-n2586334

A watchdog in Georgia filed a lawsuit for absentee ballots to be unsealed in Fulton County on account of allegations of potential fraud. Judge Brian Amero indicated on Monday that the ballots could be unsealed, as mandated by Georgia law, in order to dispel a lack of confidence in the 2020 election’s integrity.

“We want to do this in such a way that dispels rumors and disinformation and sheds light,” Amero said at a hearing regarding the ballots on Monday, per the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “The devil’s in the details.”

Former Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), who is heading a new group focused on restoring election integrity and voter confidence, supports the move to “unseal and investigate” absentee ballots.

“Georgia voters deserve to have confidence that their voice – and their vote – is heard. Unfortunately, the many irregularities we saw in the 2020 elections have eroded trust in our electoral process,” Loeffler said. “We fully support the move to unseal and investigate absentee ballot process in Fulton County. Transparency is the first step toward restoring integrity and accountability in our elections, and we look forward to the investigations’ findings.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Paralyzed by Fear? Johns Hopkins Doctor Notices Something Peculiar About the COVID Vaccine Guidelines: Matt Vespa

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/03/15/paralyzed-by-fear-johns-hopkins-doctor-notices-something-peculiar-about-the-cdc-n2586291

Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine was bold in his projection that we’ll have herd immunity by April. This has been disputed by those who are nowhere near his level of expertise when it comes to public health, but I get the pushback since it shreds the Democratic Party’s COVID lockdown regime. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Makary says that we’re underestimating natural immunity and with the pace of vaccinations, we’ll reach that critical benchmark towards reclaiming normality by tax season. 

“About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%,” Dr. Makary wrote. With those figures, he estimates that two-thirds of the country has already had the infection. We’re rapidly approaching 100 million vaccinations. It’s not an insane projection, but one he says other health experts are afraid to push for fear of impacting the rate of vaccinations. That’s not their job, he argued. Good health news should be disseminated, not buried. There was pushback, and there will be more when he recently wrote about the vaccine protocols.

The good doctor cited an Israeli study that shows those given the Pfizer vaccine are virtually “bulletproof” four weeks after the first dose. That’s the keyword right there. So, we can be returning to normal if the CDC wasn’t so busy peddling exaggerated threats about the virus and being stricken with fear, which Makary noted with their latest guidelines. Is it ‘follow the science’ or ‘be afraid, be very afraid’?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Secretly taped Facebook executive said the company is too powerful and should be broken up by Nihal Krishan,

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/secretly-taped-facebook-executive-company-too-powerful-broken-up

A senior executive at Facebook was secretly recorded saying that the social media giant harms the world, that it needs to be broken up, and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be removed.

A video released Monday of Benny Thomas, Facebook’s global planning lead, shows him candidly expressing his opinions about his employer to an undercover journalist from Project Veritas, a right-wing activist news outlet founded by James O’Keefe.

“I work for a company that is doing a lot of damage in the world,” Thomas said in the video.

“It’s doing a lot of good, but it’s doing a lot of damage,” he added.

Thomas said that other platforms that Facebook owns, such as Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp, “need to be separate companies” because it’s “too much power when they’re all one together.”

“I would break it up, and I would remove [Mark Zuckerberg] as the CEO,” Thomas said.

In a recent survey of 1500 tech industry employees, 77% said Big Tech companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google have too much power. Only 8% disagreed.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Bombshell Correction Sums Up the Political Media’s Corruption By David Harsanyi

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bombshell-correction-sums-up-the-political-medias-corruption/

As long as liberal subscribers value partisan porn over accuracy, this woeful trend won’t change.

L ast week, the Wall Street Journal published a piece detailing a six-minute call — with audio — between then-president Donald Trump and the Georgia secretary of state’s chief investigator, Frances Watson. At the time, Watson was conducting a forensic audit of 2020 mail-in ballots in a few Georgia counties.

This week, the Journal’s reporting precipitated the Washington Post to offer a correction to their initial story that went like so:

Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

There is, of course, a crucial difference between a president instructing an investigator to “find the fraud” so she can become “a national hero” and a president telling an investigator he believes she will find fraud if she looks. To contend that Trump was “misquoted” or that the quotes were “misattributed” is to critically understate the dishonesty in the original story. Indeed, it is fair to say that the quotes were fabricated by someone, not misattributed, and then they were published by every major news outlet in the country as a verified fact. Even the Post’s headline for its follow-up — “Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia’s chief elections investigator” — intimates that the tape merely helps in updating the initial reporting rather than completely decimating it.

The single anonymous source used for the story seems to be Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whose office was under pressure from the president at time. Fuchs still claims that the story accurately portrayed the spirit of the conversation that was relayed to him, maybe by Watson. The tape tells a different story.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Meghan Markle, George Floyd, Muhammad and free speech by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/meghan-markle-george-floyd-muhammad-and-free-speech/

The latest scandal surrounding the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is noteworthy. This isn’t because of the ire that it’s been arousing, however; righteous indignation is literally and figuratively all the rage during these days of “woke.”

No, the element that sets this brouhaha apart from its predecessors is the absence of mass murder. Yes, when the ink dries on the current pages of the Paris-based periodical and the Twittersphere moves on to the next hashtag, there won’t be any corpses to count.

The current storm involves a lampoon of Oprah Winfrey’s March 7 interview on CBS with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Titled “Why Meghan quit Buckingham,” the March 13 cartoon depicts Markle being kneed in the neck by Harry’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, with the explanation: “Because I couldn’t breathe anymore.”

The reference was to the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. The insinuation is that Markle, whose mother is black, whisked her husband out of the United Kingdom as a result of her being slowly suffocated by the ostensibly “racist” royal family.
The former member of the “Suits” cast even indicated this during her intimate chat with Oprah that was viewed by more than 60 million people worldwide.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Glenn Greenwald:How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-do-big-media-outlets-so-often?token=ey

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end.

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

The New York Times’ May, 2017 announcement of Robert Mueller as special counsel stated explicitly that his task was “to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials” and specifically “investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vaccines Free Us From Fauci’s Despotic Reign Soon, life will be back to normal — and no longer controlled by politicking public health experts. by Reed Spaulding IV, MD

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/covid-vaccines-dr-fauci/

One year into this pandemic, we are seeing signs of hope that life will return to normal sometime this year. States across the country are relaxing COVID restrictions. This is drawing criticism from some, including President Biden, calling such moves “Neanderthal thinking.” Perhaps it takes one to know one, Joe. Who let you out of the basement, anyway? Far from being Neanderthals, millions of people are rightfully celebrating a relative return to normalcy in many states across the country. Godspeed to them, I say.

How did we get here? How did we come to a point where we feel gratitude that our government is “allowing” us to begin to live normally again? COVID itself undoubtedly harmed many people’s health and has sadly killed over half a million of our citizens, but the mitigation policies also have caused much harm to others. Many of us have been shocked to learn that we live in a country where the stroke of an executive’s pen can shutter businesses, force masking, etc., with no legislative input whatsoever.

How did they get away with this type of societal control? Well, every good story of psychological manipulation has a bogeyman (or perhaps I should say “bogeyperson,” to please the woke crowd). Whom did the writers of 2020 pencil in as the monster in this tale? In order to maintain complete control, they intelligently picked the most damning and insidious villain possible. They picked you.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

How to End Biden’s Fake Climate Apocalypse If there’s no pushback against the Left, we’ll see a dramatic drop in our standard of living. Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/climate-change-global-warming/
With the wave of executive orders and legislation coming from the Biden administration, and the cultural antics of his woke supporters, Biden’s war on fossil fuels has received insufficient attention. Yet energy is the lifeblood of our economy, and making traditional energy sources vastly more expensive is the single most destructive aspect of Biden’s policies. If this country does not successfully mobilize against these policies, the vast majority will experience a dramatic drop in their standard of living.

Supposedly the assault on fossil fuels — via regulation; cancellation of pipelines; concocting a huge, wholly imaginary “social cost of carbon”; taxes; and solar and wind mandates — is necessary to save the planet from imminent catastrophe produced by man-made global warming.

But genuine climate scientists, as we know from those who dare to speak up, are amazed and horrified. Richard Lindzen, long at the top of the field as a former professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT, laments that the situation gets sillier and sillier. He told the recent CPAC conference (his message was read by the Heartland Institute’s James Taylor):

One problem with conveying our message is the difficulty people have in recognizing the absurdity of the alarmist climate message. They can’t believe that something so absurd could gain such universal acceptance. Consider the following situation. Your physician declares that your complete physical will consist in simply taking your temperature. This would immediately suggest something wrong with your physician. He further claims that if your temperature is 98.7F rather than 98.6F you must be put on life support. Now you know he is certifiably insane. The same situation for climate is considered “settled science.”