Texas Gov. Abbott Will Open State ‘100 Percent,’ Lift Mask Mandate By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/texas-gov-abbott-will-open-state-100-percent-lift-mask-mandate/

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced Tuesday that he will reopen the state “at 100 percent” and will rescind the statewide mask mandate beginning next Wednesday.

“Too many Texans have been sidelined from employment opportunities,” Abbott said. “Too many small business owners have struggled to pay their bills. This must end. It is now time to open Texas 100 percent.”

“Every business that wants to be open should be open,” he said.

However, he warned that removing the mandates “does not end personal responsibility.”

“Personal vigilance to follow the safe standards is still needed to contain COVID. It’s just that now state mandates are no longer needed,” he said.

He said the state’s vaccination efforts, as well as decreasing COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations will allow for the state to safely reopen. The state has the lowest positivity rate it has seen in months.

Investigate Biden Insiders For Offenses Against The Republic

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/03/investigate-bidens-handlers-for-crimes-against-the-republic/

It was clear during the 2020 presidential campaign that Joe Biden was a man in decline. Yet the Democrats ran him as their candidate anyway. Was their obsession with removing Donald Trump from the White House worth turning over the federal machine, with its nuclear codes and ability to destroy innocent people, to a man whose faculties are failing him?

Biden’s cognitive challenges have been obvious to anyone who’s willing to make an honest assessment. In both public appearances and in controlled conditions, he’s slurred words, spewed gibberish, stumbled through remarks even with the aid of a teleprompter, and often had the look of a man lost. His lowlights of 2020 include calling the Declaration of Independence “the thing,” appearing to think he was still in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s running for the U.S Senate, and bumbling basic facts.

Ted Rall, a man of the left and no friend of Trump, complained a year ago – in March 2020, not in September or October – that Democrats were “conspiring to gaslight the American people by engineering the presidential election of a man clearly suffering from dementia, Joe Biden.” At roughly the same time, Eoin Higgins, no Republican he, tweeted that “Biden clearly has serious cognitive issues.”

Biden Admin Will Not Allow Reporters To Tour Child Migrant Detention Facilities, Cite COVID-19 By Emily Zanotti

https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-admin-will-not-allow-reporters-to-tour-child-migrant-detention-facilities-cite-covid-19?%3Futm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dwtwitter

The Biden administration will not allow reporters to tour juvenile detention facilities now housing unaccompanied minors who came across the United States-Mexico border seeking asylum.

“Reporters will not be allowed inside the Carrizo Springs facility for unaccompanied minors that was recently opened under the Biden administration in Texas, a Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families (ACF) spokesperson” said in response to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request to tour the facility.

“The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is not hosting media tours of unaccompanied children (UC) facilities currently due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the spokesperson told the media outlet, echoing an answer reportedly given to ABC News when they also requested a tour.

“If media tours resume, we will send a media advisory,” the spokesperson added.

During a press briefing Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he would “look into” the ABC News reporter’s claims, telling the media that the Biden administration was “open” to media scrutiny.

DHS warns Biden of crisis: Record 117,000 unaccompanied children expected at border this year.by Anna Giaritelli

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-biden-117-000-unaccompanied-migrant-children-border

The Biden administration reportedly expects an unprecedented surge of unaccompanied migrant children showing up on the southern border in hopes of being admitted into the United States during its first year.

Border officials anticipate 117,000 children will arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border without a parent or guardian in 2021, according to a White House domestic policy council document to be shared with President Biden this afternoon, which Axios reported Tuesday. The number is higher than the 68,000 taken into custody during the 2014 surge of solo children and the 80,000 who arrived during the 2019 humanitarian crisis at the border.

“I actually think that’s an undercount,” Victor Manjarrez, Jr., a former senior Border Patrol agent who teaches about law and human behavior at the University of Texas at El Paso, told the Washington Examiner.

Manjarrez pointed to the Biden administration’s decision to discontinue the 10-month practice of returning all unaccompanied children to Mexico rather than bringing them into U.S. custody as a leading factor for smugglers sending 2,000 children over the border each week this month. After taking office in January, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directed border officials not to send any single child south of the border, choosing instead to stick along the lines of a 2007 trafficking law that protected most single children from being deported.

Operation Warp Speed’s Triumph Trump’s vaccine bet was government’s best pandemic decision.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-warp-speeds-triumph-11614728552?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

American governments, federal and state, have made many mistakes in the Covid-19 pandemic. But the great success—the saving grace—was making a financial bet in collaboration with private American industry on the development of vaccines. That effort is now letting the country see the possibility of a return to relatively normal life as early as the spring.

President Biden announced Tuesday that the U.S. should have enough vaccine supply for every American adult by the end of May. Last week the Food and Drug Administration finally approved Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and this week J&J struck a deal with Merck to manufacture the single-shot J&J vaccine as well. With the Moderna and Pfizer shots already going into more than a million American arms each week, thousands of lives will be saved.

It’s important to appreciate what an achievement this is. Critics scoffed when President Trump set a target of having a vaccine approved by the end of 2020, and Kamala Harris suggested she might not take a shot recommended by the Trump Administration.

The Biden-Harris Administration has now changed to full-throated encouragement—though not before continuing to trash the Trump efforts. White House aides have suggested that they inherited little vaccine supply and no plan for distribution. Both claims are false.

President Donald Trump Probably Donated His Entire $1.6M Salary Back To The U.S. Government – Here Are The Details Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/02/27/president-donald-trum

The President of the United States makes $400,000 annually, before taxes. During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to donate his salary if elected President. It was a promise, even his critics acknowledge, that Trump was keeping.

The presidential salary is a requirement of the U.S. Constitution in Article II, Section 1, Clause 7 and the specific amount is set by Congress. Presidents are not legally allowed to decline their salary, but can donate it to organizations of their choosing.

Trump is the first president since John F. Kennedy to donate his salary. Both John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover donated their presidential salaries to charitable causes. According to congressional records, George Washington initially declined his $25,000 salary, but Congress wouldn’t let him.

Trump’s first-quarter 2017 salary donation to the National Park Service was for $78,333, likely his take-home pay after taxes. The Park Service said an anonymous donor gave $22,000 to round the donation up to $100,000.

In subsequent press events, Trump presented personal checks for an even $100,000, indicating he was dipping into his own personal finances to make up the difference himself.

President Trump donated at least $1.4 million of the $1.6 million he earned as president to various federal agencies. Still in question, however, are the donations for the third and fourth quarters of 2020. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com verified fourteen of sixteen quarterly donations over four years.

Crocodile Tears for Khashoggi Betray Info Op to Promote His Fellow Islamists Ben Weingarten

https://www.theepochtimes.com/crocodile-tears-for-khashoggi-betray-info-op-to-promote-his-fellow-islamists_3717242.html

With the Biden administration releasing an intelligence assessment claiming de facto Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) approved the grisly 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the political-media class is once again shedding crocodile tears over his death. Its purpose is more than performative. It is signaling the dawn of the rebooted Obama-Biden administration project to Make the Middle East Great for Islamists Again, aided by the Iran Deal–Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber that is reassembling in real-time to amplify such stories.

We know the outrage over Khashoggi’s murder, which the Biden administration has re-stoked, is disingenuous on account of two things: First, the political-media class has always been at pains to lionize Khashoggi as a highly sympathetic, muckraking, dissident journalist, while airbrushing out the more unsavory details of his life. Such details include his Muslim Brotherhood support and mourning of Osama bin Laden’s death, apparent anti-Semitism, the backing of his Saudi-critical work by rival Qatar, and past service as a Saudi government mouthpiece. Second, the political-media class has, by contrast, ignored the fates of the scores of journalists who fit the idealized Khashoggi profile, from China, to Turkey, to Iran.

To mention these omissions of Khashoggi’s views and associations is not to diminish his murder. But it is to call into question the circumstances surrounding it, which matter if there are to be consequences for our national security and foreign policy—as our political-media class has long demanded.

The facts suggest that contra the Official Narrative of Khashoggi as a freedom-fighting regime critic-in-exile, it might be more accurate to describe him as an Islamist political operative who was participating in a high-stakes geopolitical game involving dangerous players—among them competing factions of the House of Saud, Qatar, and Turkey.

Alarming Cybersecurity Stats: What You Need To Know For 2021 by Chuck Brooks

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/03/02/alarming-cybersecurity-stats——-what-you-need-to-know-for-2021/

The year 2020 broke all records when it came to data lost in breaches and sheer numbers of cyber-attacks on companies, government, and individuals. In addition, the sophistication of threats increased from the application of emerging technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and 5G,  and especially from greater tactical cooperation among hacker groups and state actors. The recent Solar Winds attack, among others,  highlighted both the threat and sophistication of those realities.

The following informational links are compiled from recent statistics pulled from a variety of articles and blogs. As we head deeper into 2021, it is worth exploring these statistics and their potential cybersecurity implications in our changing digital landscape.

To make the information more useable, I have broken down the cybersecurity statistics in several categories, including Top Resources for Cybersecurity Stats, The State of Cybersecurity Readiness, Types of Cyber-threats, The Economics of Cybersecurity, and Data at Risk.

Are We All Controlled Opposition Now? Diana West

http://Are We All Controlled Opposition Now? https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4202/Are-We-All-Controlled-Opposi

 On the matter of whether President Trump’s speech at CPAC uplifted or depressed:

I could not have been more depressed while listening to Part 1. It was a stump speech without a stump. Every reference to the terrible things “the Biden administration” is doing to our country without first and foremost establishing the regime’s illegitimacy has the effect of normalizing that regime. It wasn’t enough for Trump to flick at maybe having to win the presidency for a “third” time, either. I felt as though we were watching the debut of Trump’s capitulation to the Narrative. C-PAC, after all, has a long tradition of enforcing capitulations when it comes to the existential threats of the moment, including immigration, Islam, subversion. I had to turn off the President altogether during what turned out to be his lengthy paeon to “the vaccine.” Is it be possible he is unaware of the peril involved in injecting untested and unneccessary gene therapies into human beings? The role the vaccine(s) plays in the Great Reset agenda to turn humanity into digital slaves? These remain open questions. 

When I dared to turn the sound back on, Trump was into Part 2: the stolen election. No longer was he blinding us to the nightmare that paralyzes the nation by pretending Biden won office freely and fairly. This I found uplifting the way truth is uplifting. Trump ran through some of the stunning election anomalies and fraud events, he excoriated SCOTUS and the courts for their cowardice (I prefer “treachery”) in refusing to hear the cases presenting evidence of same, and tossed out other choice items in the red meat category, including shout-outs to warmonger Liz Cheney and other GOP monsters. I, for one, gobbled it all up hungrily, and listened as he laid out a series of  essential steps Republicans “must” take to restore free and fair elections in the USA, and “Save America,” his new mission. He looked tanned, rested and ready, and that was uplifting, too.

But ready for what? Was it really red meat or junk food? That is, came the dawn, no bounce. Without having Trump before me, without seeing him under the lights, on stage, where I could marvel at his undimmed confidence and charisma, the glow was gone and the message was cold. He went back to being President-in-exile and we were still captives of the circus ring that American political arena has become.

Why do I say “circus ring”? The responsible government authories failed to acknowledge and rectify the election fraud of November 3; worse, they perpetrated and/or enabled it. That means that campaigning in the future will be no more than jumping through hoops; voting will be no more than entering data for an algorthm to apportion to the Swamp candidate of choice. From hereon out, politics in America becomes a pre-scripted affair with all the twists and turns of a debate in the Supreme Soviet. How do we Save America from that?

This Hand and That Hand: The Biden Administration on Iran Shoshana Bryen

 https://www.newsweek.com/this-hand-that-hand-biden-administration-iran-opinion

The media is full of news about American airstrikes on Iranian-supported militias in Syria. Yes—it is a big deal and an appropriate measure—but if that’s the left hand of the Biden administration, watch out for the right. This is becoming a theme.

In early January, though little remarked upon in the Western press, Iran seized the South Korean oil tanker MT Hankuk Chemi in international waters in the Persian Gulf. Coincidentally (Tehran says), Iran demanded the release of funds frozen by the South Korean government under the U.S.-led sanctions regime. Most of the crew was released in February, but the ship and its captain remain in Iranian waters. South Korea has now agreed to release $1 billion out of an estimated $7–9 billion held by Seoul. According to a Korean Foreign Ministry source, “The actual unfreezing of the assets will be carried out through consultations with related countries, including the United States.”

South Korea, an American ally, wanted its ship and captain back while not breaking sanctions. It appears that the Biden administration offered Seoul a bit of a sleight of hand, suggesting that some of the funds either go directly to pay Iran’s dues in arrears to the UN or go toward humanitarian activity controlled by outside organizations. The Iranian government says Tehran will determine where the money is spent.

If the money ends up in Iranian banks, you will know how that negotiation went.