Lying About Obama A new biography uncovers the facts behind the fake news. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/lying-about-obama-bruce-bawer/

Jack Cashill has written over a dozen books, including two about the mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, one about the Trayvon Martin case, and two – now three – about Barack Obama. His new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is a definitive account not only of Obama’s eight years in office but also of the transformation of most mainstream American political journalists, largely during the Obama era, from relatively objective reporters of the facts – emphasis on “relatively” – to dedicated partisans of the left, ready and eager at every turn to cover up unpleasant truths (however important) about Democrats and to promote outrageous lies (however destructive) about Republicans.

Fortunately, in the age of the Internet, the mainstream media have competition. Yes, there are scads of people who purvey nonsense online. But there are also serious writers who are devoted not to the Democratic Party narrative but to the facts. Some of them have worked in the mainstream media only to lose their jobs because of their excessive curiosity about matters that their bosses considered off-limits. Ken Timmerman, a Clinton voter in 1992, was fired by Time when, in 1994, he “followed the facts on the China trade to the doors of the Oval Office.” Sharyl Attkisson’s interest in the Benghazi story forced her out of CBS News. Both kept writing, but for less prestigious – and less lucrative – outlets. Cashill calls these non-mainstream writers “Lilliputians” (for the teeny-weeny people, of course, in Gulliver’s Travels) and describes them as members of the new American samizdat, borrowing the Russian word used in Soviet times to denote, as he puts it, “the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.”

Biden Pick for Human Rights Undersecretary Worked for Group That Claimed Jews Were Behind 9/11 Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/biden-pick-human-rights-undersecretary-worked-daniel-greenfield/

Another day, another antisemitic Biden nominee.

Earlier this month, I reported on Biden’s choice of Hady “I was inspired by the Palestinian intifada” Amr a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel-Palestine. Now, Alana Goodman at the Free Beacon digs into another problematic Biden nominee who has issues with Jews.

Uzra Zeya nominated for undersecretary of civilian security, democracy, and human rights compiled research for a book that argues that “the Israel lobby has subverted the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy”

Zeya, a former U.S. diplomat who was nominated for undersecretary for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, worked for the Washington Report and its publishing group, the American Educational Trust, in 1989 and 1990. The news outlet is staunchly anti-Israel and has published articles questioning the national loyalty of American Jews and opposing taxpayer funding to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sean Durns, a research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, called the Washington Report a “fringe organization” that has “published content with anti-Semitic themes,” including claims that the Mossad was behind the JFK assassination and the Sept. 11 attacks…

Dems Introduce Bill Banning President Trump’s Burial at Arlington Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/dems-introduce-bill-banning-president-trumps-daniel-greenfield/

Ugly. But ugly is Rep. Linda Sanchez’s middle name. 

Sanchez, whose husband was indicted on corruption charges, introduced H. R. 484 which she calls the No Glory for Hate Act which bars “the use of Federal funds for the commemoration of certain former Presidents”.

Which certain presidents? 

“any former President that has been twice impeached by the House of Representatives on or before the date of enactment of this Act ”

That’s convenient because it leaves out Bill Clinton and any Democrat that Republicans go on to impeach twice. But being impeached once is okay.

Sanchez, who found 13 Democrat co-sponsors for this vile ugliness, includes a ban on buying President Trump at Arlington, “the Secretary of Defense shall not approve a determination of eligibility for interment or inurnment in Arlington National Cemetery made by the Secretary of the Army that permits the interment or inurnment in Arlington National Cemetery of any former President that has been twice impeached by the House of Representatives.”

Co-sponsors for this include Rep. Schakowsky, Rep. Napolitano, Rep. Davis, Rep. Carson, Rep. Escobar, Rep. Lee, Barbara, Rep. Blumenauer, Rep. Hayes, 
Rep. Gallego, Rep. Connolly, Rep. Lowenthal, Rep. Williams, and Rep. Chu.

The War on Trump Racist Dems buy a ticket in the leftist lawsuit lottery. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/war-trump-matthew-vadum/

The leftist NAACP, which never met a conservative it didn’t consider to be a racist hatemonger, is suing former President Donald Trump using an obscure law that was wielded against the Democratic Party-affiliated terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan who murdered blacks and their Republican enemies after the Civil War.

The Ku Klux Klan Act is an unusual tool to pull from a cobweb-covered chest of old laws nobody knew were still in existence. President Ulysses S. Grant (he’s the guy on the $50 bill, millennials!) used the statute to declare martial law, penalize terrorist organizations, and use military force to suppress the KKK after the Civil War.

Those who filed this baseless, pie-in-the-sky lawsuit don’t give a farthing’s cuss about justice. The Democratic National Committee needs a reason to keep squeezing its donors and Trump is the most impressive object of revilement Democrats have had to shriek at in decades.

This is just part of a long-running campaign of harassment aimed at destroying Florida’s own Trump, who was acquitted after an unprecedented two impeachment trials, besting the previous record-holding acquittees Andrew Johnson of Tennessee and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

It comes after an armada of court-authorized fishing expeditions and emoluments lawsuits failed to take away the presidency that Hillary Clinton so devoutly wished had been hers.

We all know that The Left was fine with Trump until he got into politics on the Republican side. It bestowed a truckload of honors on him before he became president, including the Muhammad Ali Entrepreneur Award (2007) and alongside Rosa Parks, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (1986). But these blindly hateful people need to keep busy and sewing quilts, downvoting disfavored books on Amazon, and throwing Molotov cocktails at cops and burns up so much of the day.

Tom Cotton’s Strategy to ‘Consign the Chinese Communists to the Ash Heap of History’ By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/02/18/tom-cotton-lays-out-a-strategy-to-fight-the-new-cold-war-against-china-n1426674

On Thursday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) released a roadmap to counter the Chinese Communist Party and prevail in a new “Cold War” against this “Evil Empire.”

“This Evil Empire preys on—and spies on—Americans. It imprisons innocent people in concentration camps. It uses slave labor to fuel its factories. And it denies basic freedoms to all its 1.4 billion people,” Cotton declared in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Chicago. “We need to beat this Evil Empire—and consign the Chinese Communists, like the Bolsheviks, to the ash heap of history.”

He released a report entitled “Beat China: Targeted Decoupling and the Economic Long War” that laid out three central goals to combat China: decoupling, mitigating the effects of decoupling, and reorganizing the federal government to better respond to the CCP.

Cotton praised Reagan’s historic success at defeating the Soviet Union without firing a shot, but he warned that the “Cold War” against China “will be more complicated than the first. China is wealthier and more populous than any enemy America has ever faced. It’s also more entangled with us economically.”

Cotton acknowledged that America’s “deep dependence on China didn’t grow overnight.” Rather, Americans actively pursued a “strategic partnership” with the Chinese Communist Party on the grounds that open markets and open borders would make China rich and then lead China on the path to freedom. China indeed became rich, “but instead of reforming, the Communist Party began to exploit new connections between our free society and its totalitarian society.”

How Gone is He? Scott Johnson

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/02/how-gone-is-he.php

President Biden claimed during his CNN town hall in Wisconsin on Tuesday that his administration came into office with no coronavirus vaccines available. Zachary Evans gives this helpful straight news account for NR (also published here at Yahoo! News):

Biden received his first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 21, and the second dose in January. While discussing the issue of vaccine supply during the town hall, Biden initially said there were 50 million doses available when he assumed office.

“We came into office, there were only 50 million doses that were available. By the end of July we’ll have over 600 million doses,” Biden told host Anderson Cooper.

However, Biden also said “we got into office and found out…there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available.” (The Biden administration’s initial target was to administer 1 million vaccine doses per day, a pace already set by the time the president was sworn in.)

“It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but” one also needs “a vaccinator,” Biden subsequently told Cooper, when asked about the logistics of getting shots to Americans.

Biden’s remarks are confused, confusing, and absurdly erroneous. How gone is he? Or aren’t we supposed to ask?

Exit question: Where have all the vaccinators gone?

Exposed: The Media Has Been Lying About The Capitol Protests

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/19/exposed-the-media-has-been-lying-about-the-capitol-protests/

Earlier this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced plans for a 9/11-style commission to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex.” Will that investigation include the media’s role in peddling flagrant falsehoods about what actually happened that day?

Look up any story about the storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters, and you will find it described as a “deadly riot” that killed five people.

Worse still, one of the deaths was that a police officer who – the story goes – was killed by rioters after getting hit in the head by a fire extinguisher.

Then there is the story of the protestor who “carried Zip Ties into the Capitol,” which led to accusations that the protestors intended to take hostages.

There have also been endless media descriptions of the event as an “armed insurrection.”

And there were stories claiming that, as Reuters put it, “Capitol rioters meant to ‘capture and assassinate’ officials.”

What is common about all of these media-fed narratives?

Not one of them is true. Not. One.

Let’s take each claim in turn.

The “fact” that five people were killed is false. Only one person is known to have been killed inside the building. She was a protester who was shot at close range by a police officer. (Had she been a minority, there would have been riots in the streets over police brutality.)

Two others died of “medical emergencies” while they happened to be on the Capitol grounds – which is not uncommon in mass gatherings. Another was apparently trampled by protestors climbing the Capitol steps – which is indeed a tragedy.

Conservatism Is Now a Public-Health Risk ????!!!!****####

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-conservatism-is-now-a-public-health-risk-11613690706?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

From “Public policy and health in the Trump era,” a Feb. 10 report by the Lancet, a British medical journal:

Trump exploited low and middle-income white people’s anger over their deteriorating life prospects to mobilise racial animus and xenophobia. . . . His appeals to racism, nativism, and religious bigotry have emboldened white nationalists and vigilantes, and encouraged police violence and, at the end of his term in office, insurrection. He chose judges for US courts who are dismissive of affirmative action and reproductive, labour, civil, and voting rights; ordered the mass detention of immigrants in hazardous conditions; and promulgated regulations that reduce access to abortion and contraception in the USA and globally.

Return of the Swamp Creatures Democrats prepare to bring back earmarks. Republicans should resist the temptation. By Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/return-of-the-swamp-creatures-11613690674?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Washington doesn’t usually make it easy to pinpoint the moment when things went wrong. So thanks to Rep. Rosa DeLauro for publicly heralding the return of the swamp.

The announcement actually came from a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, which the Connecticut Democrat oversees. “Chair DeLauro supports Member-directed funding for community projects,” Evan Hollander told HuffPost this week. For those uninitiated in Washington doublespeak, earmarks are back.

A few other English words to describe what’s returning: Pork. Logrolling. Sleaze. Bridges to nowhere. Republicans banned earmarks in February 2011 after the term became synonymous with Congress’s embarrassing habit. The late Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had led a yearslong campaign to expose earmarks as a “gateway drug” to greater spending and corruption. In the face of a tea-party revolt, his colleagues finally chose wisdom.

Democrats are choosing power. According to reports, Ms. DeLauro and Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy will soon announce that earmarks are welcome in annual spending bills. Why would Democrats risk such a move? Politico explains that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has reassured his party that it won’t suffer, since the effort will be “bipartisan.” Democrats are banking on spend-thirsty Republicans to provide cover.

The question is whether the GOP will succumb, handing the Democratic leadership a uniquely powerful tool in today’s narrowly divided Congress. Republicans may botch their first opportunity to draw a stark contrast in governance, wield some real power, and energize their base.

We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news. By Marty Makary

https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health, chief medical adviser to Sesame Care, and author of “The Price We Pay.”

Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?

In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.

Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.

There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.