Death Toll Mounts as Myanmar’s Military Seeks to Crush Protests Police open fire on demonstrators, killing at least 38 people in deadliest day since coup

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nine-killed-in-myanmar-as-regime-seeks-to-crush-anticoup-protests-11614775439

At least 38 people were killed as Myanmar’s new military rulers, who overthrew its democratically elected government Feb. 1, continued to unleash a lethal campaign to suppress protests that have swept the country for nearly a month.

The death toll, announced by the United Nations, makes Wednesday the deadliest day since the takeover.

Security forces opened fire at protesters in numerous cities, according to demonstrators and medics responding to the violence. A 19-year-old woman, wearing a T-shirt that read, “Everything will be ok,” was fatally shot in the head. Men were struck by bullets in their eyes and chests as they ran, and police assaulted medics.

Protesters had been more cautious since a crackdown on Sunday, when police killed at least 18 people. Security forces who had only occasionally shot live rounds before that day have since used gunfire frequently, according to civil-society groups, protesters and medics.

Protesters have poured into the streets for 26 straight days demanding that the coup, which ended a decadelong transition to democracy, be reversed. Demonstrations at times drawing tens of thousands have taken place, with crowds mobilizing in towns and cities across the country. The large-scale participation has underscored the broad rejection of the military, which governed Myanmar for half a century before the democratic shift began.

The killings on Sunday and Wednesday indicate that the generals are turning to the same approach used during decades of army dictatorship to crush dissent: bloodshed, mass arrests and nightly raids to strike terror. Commander in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, who is now in control, has shown no willingness to compromise or respond to the widespread international condemnation of the military regime’s actions. He has said authorities are acting with restraint.

On Wednesday, six people were killed in the country’s largest city, Yangon, according to a doctor at the North Okkalapa General Hospital. Others died in the central cities of Mandalay, Monywa and Myingyan, according to rescue organizations helping the injured in those places.

The International Criminal Court Violates Its Statute by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17126/international-criminal-court-violations

At present… the ICC renders itself irrelevant by adjudicating “national jurisdictions” perfectly capable of doing so while refusing to adjudicate or indict the world’s worst violators of human rights.

The ICC has already provided its critics with plenty of ammunition to question the Court’s legitimacy as a consequence of additional violations of its founding statute. Neither Israel nor the United States ratified the Rome Statute (the ICC’s founding treaty). The Court therefore has no jurisdiction whatsoever over the state actions of either country.

State parties dissatisfied with the ICC’s dismal record should be encouraged to discontinue financial support for the Court or to withdraw altogether from the Hague-based institution.

Meanwhile, at least four Gulf Arab states and other Muslim-majority countries appear far more concerned, with good reason, about Iran’s drive for regional supremacy, while welcoming warming relations with Israel, which will prove a most loyal friend.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), by straying far from its original purpose, has perjured itself. The ICC was established in 1998 to bring justice to victims of systematic atrocity in countries unable to do so. In its own words, “The core mandate of the ICC is to act as a court of last resort with the capacity to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes when national jurisdictions for any reason are unable or unwilling to do so.”

At present, however, the ICC renders itself irrelevant by adjudicating “national jurisdictions” perfectly capable of doing so, while refusing to adjudicate or indict the world’s worst violators of human rights.

The Court’s February 5 decision authorizing the investigation of unfounded allegations of a pattern of human rights violations supposedly committed by Israel Defense Force (IDF) personnel underscores the ICC’s corrupted political nature.

First, the ICC has violated its founding statute by accepting into its docket a complaint against a sovereign state (Israel) by a non-state entity (Palestinian plaintiffs), twisting international law to try to alchemize “Palestine” into a state by pointing to its observer status in some UN bodies. Close but no cigar. The Court, by trying to legitimize the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) illegal briefs, therefore only confirms the views of its critics that it merely serves as an instrument of the Palestinian Arab propaganda war against Israel.

The Court further underscores these violations by treating Hamas as a legal equivalent of Israel in the terrorist group’s charges against the IDF in the 2014 Gaza War.

The Left’s Campaign Against Self-Defense By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_lefts_campaign_against_selfdefense.html

Last week, federal prosecutors offered an undisclosed plea deal to two lawyers who firebombed an NYPD van and drove around passing out Molotov cocktails to protesters at a violent May 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest in Brooklyn. Urooj Rahman, 31, and Colinford Mattis, 32, who was driving the car used in the crime, had been indicted in June for arson, conspiracy, and the use of explosives. They faced life imprisonment.

In the name of “social justice,” politicians and the judiciary in many cities and states are bestowing moral rights on violent left-wing and anarchist groups. District attorney Mike Schmidt, for instance, announced in August that he won’t prosecute most of the 550 people arrested during the 75 days of mayhem in Portland last spring. He said the leniency was an attempt to “create a forum” to express “collective grief, anger, and frustration” at the death of George Floyd and the history of abuses endured by people of color. Worse, he said using the criminal justice system against them would “undermine public safety” for those “demanding to be heard.” Schmidt, his Democrat cohort, and leftist sympathizers in journalism, law, and academia willfully ignore the fact that such misplaced clemency condones and encourages militant groups’ violence, their disrespect for the law, and their anti-American agenda.

In stark contrast, prosecutors are bearing down heavily on gun owners who defended themselves at protests by militant leftist groups like Antifa and BLM. Under threat are the Second Amendment right to bear arms and the legal justification to act in self-defense.

Media Memoryholes the Sicknick Story Now that the media and lawmakers on both sides achieved their common goal of weaponizing Brian Sicknick’s death against the president and his supporters, they’ve crudely abandoned his cause.  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/media-memoryholes-the-sicknick-story/

During his Senate testimony, FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly admitted his agency does not know how Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died. “We’re not at a point where we can disclose or confirm the cause of death,” Wray, clearly uncomfortable, told Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday morning.

Unfortunately, no one on the Senate Judiciary Committee confronted Wray with the now-retracted story that Officer Sicknick was murdered by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher. Republicans missed a golden opportunity not just to expose the New York Times’ primary role in seeding the bogus account but also to confront their Democratic colleagues who voted to convict Donald Trump partially based on the notion his comments on January 6 led to the death of a police officer. “The insurrectionists killed a Capitol Police officer by striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher,” according to the House Democrats’ impeachment memo.

But suddenly, the news media have lost all interest in what happened to Sicknick. After nonstop coverage—including somber videos of the police procession in his honor and a memorial in the Capitol Rotunda, attended by Joe Biden, just days before the impeachment trial began in February—major news organizations have memoryholed the initial account about the fire extinguisher; some apparently have forgotten about Sicknick altogether.

The New York Times, the paper responsible for launching the lie, didn’t bother to mention Sicknick in its coverage of Wray’s testimony—the paper of record, however, did publish a lengthy piece Monday detailing how “Pro-Trump Forces Pushed a Lie About Antifa at the Capitol Riot.” Take a moment and savor the irony.

Trumpism—Without Trump? Who has been right about Donald Trump’s final demise in the last five years? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/trumpism-without-trump/

Six weeks ago, Americans were assured that Donald Trump had left the presidency on January 20, 2021 disgraced and forever ruined politically. 

Trump was the first president to be impeached twice, and first to be tried as a private citizen when out of office. He was the first to be impeached without the chief justice of the United States presiding over his trial.

His nonstop complaining about the stolen “landslide” election was blamed by many as a distraction that lost two Republican Senate seats from Georgia. Joe Biden’s current Democratic majority Congress was the result. 

Americans were assured by Trump’s impeachment Senate prosecutors and the media that the January 6 Capitol assault was his fault alone. So Trump was condemned as a veritable murderer, responsible for five deaths at the Capitol. Many of his own advisors and cabinet members loudly resigned in disgust.

Yet six weeks later, a Phoenix-like Trump brought a crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference to its feet. His 90-minute blistering broadside against Joe Biden’s radical first 40 days of executive orders and hard-Left appointments enthused thousands. 

Polls show that while he has lost some support in his party, Trump still wins 75 percent approval in the GOP.

So why is a supposedly once-toxic Trump apparently back at center stage? 

The Dems’ Voting Fraud Encouragement Bill A blatant power grab. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/dems-voting-fraud-encouragement-bill-joseph-klein/

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the inappropriately named “For the People Act” (H.R.1) on Wednesday evening by the largely party line vote of 221 to 207. It now goes to the Senate. This bill, if enacted into law, will be a gift that keeps on giving to Democrats who care only about staying in power rather than securing the integrity of the electoral process. “This bill makes elections less trustworthy, not more,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas.

The right to vote in a free and fair election requires procedural protections to ensure that elections are conducted in an honest manner. We must have guardrails to protect against potential election fraud, voter intimidation, illegal votes, and inaccurate vote counts. The American people’s willingness to accept the results of an election, whether a voter’s favored candidate wins or not, depends on their being convinced that the election was carried out in a legitimate manner. H.R.1 strips away any semblance of guardrails. Instead, H.R.1 creates multiple paths to election fraud, including the following:

Online Registrations: Let’s start with the provision that mandates online voter registration in federal elections, which would also allow registered voters to update their voter registration information online. With no more paper registration forms as backup, this is an invitation for hackers inside and outside the country to run amok. Hacking last year by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies of the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, nuclear labs, various cabinet department, and Fortune 500 companies should provide a clear warning that even highly secure systems are vulnerable. States’ voting registration databases will be easy pickings.

New York Public School Urges Parents to be ‘White Traitors’ Or better yet, “White Abolitionists.”Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/new-york-public-school-urges-parents-be-white-sara-dogan/

A public school in New York City has provoked a firestorm of outrage by asking parents to become “white traitors” and promote “white abolition” in an effort to allegedly fight racism.

The controversial letter was sent by Mark Federman, principal of the East Side Community School in New York City. It included an “ethnography of whiteness” written by Northwestern University associate professor Barnor Hesse who ranks all whites on a color-coded scale of “The 8 White Identities” which range from “White Supremacist” to “White Abolitionist.”

““There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities. People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse explains in an introduction above the list.

The 8 “White Identities” are then helpfully defined.

A “White Supremacist,” Hesse asserts, believes in a “Clearly marked white society that preserves, names, and values white superiority,” whereas an individual belonging to the category of “White Voyeurism” would not “challenge a White Supremacist” but still “desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting, pleasurable” and has a “fascination with culture (e.g., consuming Black culture without the burden of Blackness”).

FBI Goes Totally Comeytose Christopher Wray will spearhead Dems’ offensive against Trump supporters in the wake of January 6. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/fbi-goes-totally-comeytose-lloyd-billingsley/

“We have not to date seen any evidence of anarchist violent extremists or people subscribed to Antifa in connection with the sixth. That doesn’t mean we’re not looking, and we’ll continue to look, but at the moment we have not seen that.”

That was FBI boss Christopher Wray testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Wray claimed the FBI doesn’t care about ideology, but he left more than a reasonable doubt about how hard the FBI had been looking.

According to a January 13 FBI affidavit, self-proclaimed racial justice advocate Earle Sullivan, aka John Sullivan, “did knowingly enter or remain in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, or did knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct.”

As The Intercept explained, “the FBI determined that Sullivan was not just an observer but a participant in the riot, based on a review of nearly 90 minutes of raw footage of the raid that he recorded on his phone and posted on YouTube.”  Wray likely had the FBI looking for rioters in Antifa T-shirts. On the other hand, the FBI boss is experienced at overlooking events of significance.

Back in 2019, attorney General William Barr told a Senate panel that “spying did occur” against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. As the Associated Press reported, Barr “seemed to be alluding to a surveillance warrant the FBI obtained on a former Trump associate.”

Stop The Steal: The Case For Biden’s COVID ‘Relief’ Bill Gets Weaker By The Day ****

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/04/stop-the-steal-the-case-for-bidens-co

COVID-19 cases are plunging. Vaccination rates are booming. The economy is rebounding. States are running budget surpluses. Schools are reopening. All without the benefit of President Joe Biden’s “urgently needed” $1.9 trillion spending spree. So why aren’t supposedly moderate Senate Democrats standing up to oppose this Treasury theft, which will be paid for by future generations?

Just this week, we learned that Texas has dropped its mask mandate and is lifting limits on businesses. So is Mississippi. Biden said that vaccines will be available to all Americans by May. A report showed that manufacturing is growing at the fastest pace in years.

If you listen to Biden and his fellow leftist Democrats, none of this is supposed to be happening. To hear them talk, the economy is flat on its back, the virus raging, and the nation desperately in need of a massive dose of federal aid.

On Wednesday, Biden went on TV to say that “If we act now, decisively, quickly, and boldly, we can finally get ahead of this virus, we can finally get our economy moving again, and the people of this country have suffered far too much for too long.”

Pelosi’s Latest Partisan Commission After Jan. 6, she follows her financial-crisis script, creating a panel to reach a foregone conclusion.By Peter J. Wallison

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-latest-partisan-commission-11614795409?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Yes, history repeats itself, especially when it is made by the same person, for the same reason, and with the same vehicle. Unlike the 9/11 Commission, which was praised for its bipartisanship, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed commission to review the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will mirror the unbalanced Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission she set up after the 2008 financial crisis, and will be a failure for the same reasons.

In the election following the financial crisis, the Democrats won overwhelming control of Congress and the White House. President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said that “you never let a serious crisis go to waste,” and many on the left realized this was an opportunity to increase regulation and government control of the financial system. There was at least one other plausible cause for the crisis: government housing policies, pursued by the government-backed corporations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and strongly supported by congressional Democrats. By 2008 these trillion-dollar institutions were bankrupt and had fostered the creation of a massive housing bubble consisting of at least 31 million subprime and other risky mortgages worth $5.3 trillion. It seemed reasonable to suppose that when the bubble collapsed, the failure of these mortgages had brought the whole financial system down.

Yet if the speaker’s study had concluded that the financial crisis was caused, even in part, by those subprime mortgages, that would have weakened support for more regulation of the financial system. So the commission was set up with six Democrats and four Republicans. That would assure that the commission would place the blame for the financial crisis on insufficient regulation and not interfere with the enactment of legislation—later called the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010—that the speaker and other Democratic lawmakers had in mind.