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Even The Manipulated Senate Intel Report Can’t Hide FBI Spies And Lies By Margot Cleveland

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/22/even-the-manipulated-senate-intel-report-cant-hide-fbi-spies-and-lies/

A close reading of the report—or at least those portions of the report that could be read—cements the reality that the FBI intentionally snowed the FISA court to spy on Donald Trump.

On April 21, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on its review of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) drafted for President Barack Obama on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Corporate media immediately touted the Republican-controlled committee’s finding that “the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails, as vindication of the intelligence communities’ handling of all things Russia. But a close reading of the report—or at least those portions of the report that could be read—instead cements the reality that the FBI intentionally snowed the FISA court to spy on Donald Trump.

After Trump’s surprise election, then-President Obama directed “CIA Director John Brennan to conduct a review of all intelligence relating to Russian involvement in the 2016 election and produce a single comprehensive assessment.” With Brennan at the helm, the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and FBI compiled a report for Obama, which the FBI insisted include the now-discredited Christopher Steele dossier.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The data is in — stop the panic and end the total isolation By Dr. Scott W. Atlas

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/494034-the-data-are-in-stop-the-panic-and-end-the-total-isolation

The tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be entering the containment phase. Tens of thousands of Americans have died, and Americans are now desperate for sensible policymakers who have the courage to ignore the panic and rely on facts. Leaders must examine accumulated data to see what has actually happened, rather than keep emphasizing hypothetical projections; combine that empirical evidence with fundamental principles of biology established for decades; and then thoughtfully restore the country to function.

Five key facts are being ignored by those calling for continuing the near-total lockdown.

Fact 1: The overwhelming majority of people do not have any significant risk of dying from COVID-19.

The recent Stanford University antibody study now estimates that the fatality rate if infected is likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, a risk far lower than previous World Health Organization estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher and that motivated isolation policies.  

In New York City, an epicenter of the pandemic with more than one-third of all U.S. deaths, the rate of death for people 18 to 45 years old is 0.01 percent, or 11 per 100,000 in the population. On the other hand, people aged 75 and over have a death rate 80 times that. For people under 18 years old, the rate of death is zero per 100,000. 

Of all fatal cases in New York state, two-thirds were in patients over 70 years of age; more than 95 percent were over 50 years of age; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of 6,570 confirmed COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520, or 99.2 percent, had an underlying illness. If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition, your chances of dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.

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Congresswoman on Panel Overseeing Virus Payouts Admits Failure to Disclose Stock Sales By Zachary Stieber see note please!

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/congresswoman-on-panel-overseeing-virus-payouts-admits-failure-to-disclose-stock-sales_3322899.html

Shalala was also president of Hunter College, and chancellor of University of Wisconsin….and she “misunderstood” the ethical lapse?  Oh Puleez…. rsk

A U.S. representative named to a panel overseeing a portion of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill admitted she failed to disclose stock sales while in Congress, a violation of federal law.

Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), elected in 2019 after serving as the president of the Clinton Foundation, called what happened a “mistake.”

Under the STOCK Act, members of Congress are required to report stock transactions. But Shalala made a number of sales last year and didn’t report them.

“I missed the deadlines. But I was doing the opposite of insider trading I was getting rid of any conflict of interest in the process. I was unloading the entire portfolio so I could put everything in mutuals and ETFs so I could avoid any conflict of interest,” Shalala told CBS Miami.

“I apologize for them. It was my mistake. And I take full responsibility.”

The lawmaker, who headed the Department of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, said she knew about the STOCK Act, describing herself as a strong supporter of the law.

But a spokesman sounded a different tune, describing what happened as a “misunderstanding.”

“She had a misunderstanding about the periodic transaction report process and her need to report the sale of these stocks while preparing a blind trust,” Shalala spokesperson Carlos Condarco told the Miami Herald. “As a new member with a broker and attorney who were not familiar with the congressional disclosure rules, there was a misunderstanding.”

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VA Chief: Hydroxychloroquine Has Been Working Against COVID-19 By Zachary Stieber

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/va-chief-hydroxychloroquine-has-been-working-against-covid-19_3322683.html

The anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine has been working in COVID-19 patients, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie said on Wednesday.

Wilkie’s comments come after a study looking at the effects of the drug in 368 patients in Veterans Health Administration hospitals found no evidence the drug is effective against COVID-19, a new disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Responding to the results during an appearance on MSNBC, Wilkie said, “That’s an observational study. It’s not a clinical study. It was done on a small number of veterans; sadly, those of whom were in the last stages of life, and the drug was given to them.”

The drug “has been working on middle-age and younger veterans,” Wilkie added. By that, he meant that it was “stopping the progression of” COVID-19.

The study in question can help inform doctors who are caring for veterans who have the CCP virus, Wilkie said.

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“COVID-19 – Dissension Not Allowed” Sydney Williams

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Our reaction to COVID-19 has shown the best of us, but also the worst. Protection of the vulnerable – the elderly and those defenseless because of preconditions, ranging from obesity to diabetes – has been admirable. Healthcare workers willingly expose themselves to a novel virus, despite conflicting and changing reports as to its cause, properties, transmission and morbidity rates. Until recently, most of us have complied without complaint, acting with ovine-like acquiescence to draconian measures that have led to a “lockdown” of the economy and the loss of millions of jobs.

 

We obey common-sensical rules about social-distancing, wearing face masks, scrubbing our hands, not touching our face, sneezing into a Kleenex, and using gloves and disinfectants. Anything to slow the rate of infection of a highly contagious virus. But the lockdown of two thirds of the economy (as measured by those who do not have the option to work from home) has been pre-empted from debate. As well, some political leaders have taken lockdowns of the economy to an extreme – banning yard work, home construction projects or preventing citizens from using parks or playing golf. Some governors have used the pandemic as an excuse to get the federal government to help bailout their states’ finances. Others have talked of using Drones to monitor people’s behavior. Debate, as to the cause of COVID-19, is discouraged, as is seen in the disparagements of President Trump for calling the virus a Chinese or Wuhan virus, despite indisputable evidence that that was its origin. Those who raise questions about COVID-19 are called “anti-science,” in spite of the fact that the science regarding the virus, its characteristics, transmission and morbidity rates keep changing. We cannot forget we are in an election year. Republicans, who would like to keep the Presidency and the Senate and re-gain the House, would like to get the economy re-started as soon as possible, but without initiating a second surge of the virus. Democrats recognize that the economy has been Republicans’ strongest suit, so have an interest in the economic downturn lasting longer.

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It’s time for a reckoning for China and its compradors Thomas Lifson

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/its_time_for_a_reckoning_for_china_and_its_compradors.html

The Wuhan virus has ended the game China has been playing for the past three decades to rise from Marxist-rooted poverty to the world’s biggest manufacturer.  Virtually all of the world’s advanced economies and many of the less developed countries now realize that China is not a trustworthy partner.  Donald Trump may have been the first world leader to call the Chinese out, but he now has plenty of company:

With a series of high-level summits culminating in a visit to Germany in the fall by President Xi Jinping, this was supposed to be the year of Europe-China diplomacy. Instead, Europeans are warning of a damaging rift.

Diplomats talk of mounting anger over China’s behavior during the coronavirus pandemic including claims of price gouging by Chinese suppliers of medical equipment and a blindness to how its actions are perceived. The upshot is that Beijing’s handling of the crisis has eroded trust just when it had a chance to demonstrate global leadership.

“Over these months China has lost Europe,” said Reinhard Buetikofer, a German Green party lawmaker who chairs the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with China. He cited concerns from China’s “truth management” in the early stages of the virus to an “extremely aggressive” stance by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and “hard-line propaganda” that champions the superiority of Communist Party rule over democracy.

China’s leaders used tactics that it learned the hard way more than three centuries ago, when it tumbled from millennia-long status as the “middle kingdom,” incomparably more powerful than any rivals, to a helpless victim of more powerful foreigners, able to impose their will on and extract vast wealth from it.  Virtually all Chinese people are marinated in the history of its decline and impoverishment at the hands of the West.  The two Opium Wars led to the forcible opening of China to untrammeled trade, including the mass importation of opium, one of the few products that found a ready market there.  Britain conveniently was able to produce opium in its Indian colony and sell it to the Chinese, who sought escape from their misery.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Trump Should NOT Send Corona Aid to Palestinians By Moshe Phillips

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/why-trump-should-not-send-corona-aid-to-palestinians/2020/04/21/

President Trump’s decision to send millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian Authority is a grave mistake. Although motivated by humanitarian sentiment, the aid package will serve a very different purpose — it will free up funds for the PA to continue paying salaries to terrorists.

The reason that the United States cut off economic aid to the PA in the first place was precisely because providing that aid allowed the PA to maintain its policy of paying more than $134-million to imprisoned terrorists and to the families of dead and released terrorists.

The legislation mandating the cut-off, called the Taylor Force Act, was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in early 2018. The law did not cut off only aid that was used directly to pay terrorists. The law cut off all U.S. economic aid — because aid is fungible, so even aid which goes to, say, hospitals, frees the PA from having to help those hospitals, so it can use the money instead for terrorists.

And that’s exactly what’s about to happen.

The Trump Administration announced on April 16 that it will — through some legal loophole — send $5-million in American taxpayer money to PA hospitals to help cope with the coronavirus crisis. Sounds like a kind humanitarian gesture. But it’s badly misguided.

That $5-million is money which the PA would have otherwise had to pay, since obviously, it’s not going to let its hospitals collapse, especially in the midst of the crisis. So the PA will be able to turn around and apportion another $5-million to its “Pay for Slay” program.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: NOTES FROM NEW YORK CITY EPICENTER

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

The guv and the mayor and coercive role reversed children decree that all “senioras” and “seniores” must shelter in place.

All I can do is quote Richard Lovelace the English poet (1642) who wrote:

“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: The West’s 9/11 Moment by Richard Kemp

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15915/coronavirus-west-911-moment

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on…. Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

For decades China has been working on its three-pronged strategy: building its economy and fighting capability, including intelligence, technology, cyber and space as well as hard military power; developing global influence to exploit resources and secure control; thrusting back and dividing the US and its capitalist allies.

China’s arms exports are not motivated primarily by revenue generation, but as a means to impose influence and control, create proxies and challenge the US.

Chinese investment penetrates every corner of the UK, giving unparalleled influence here as in so many countries. Plans to allow Chinese investment and technology into our nuclear power programme and 5G network will build vulnerability into our critical national infrastructure of an order not seen in any other Western nation. Even the BBC, which receives funding from China, has produced and promoted a propaganda video supporting Huawei to the alarm of some of its own journalists. All this despite MI5’s repeated warnings that Chinese intelligence continues to work against British interests at home and abroad.

The coronavirus pandemic is a 9/11 moment. Al Qaida had been at war with the West for years before the destruction of the twin towers. But it took that barbarism to galvanise its largely supine prey into action.

Now we have Covid-19. Unlike 9/11 we have seen no evidence so far that China deliberately unleashed this virus on the world. There is certainly evidence, however, that it resulted from the policies of the Chinese Communist Party and that Beijing’s habitually duplicitous and criminally irresponsible actions allowed it to spread around the globe, leading to tens of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognise what is going on. The reality, in Beijing’s book, is that the cold war between China and the West, which began with the communist seizure of China in 1949, never ended. Despite the Sino-Soviet split and subsequent US-China rapprochement in the early 1970s, for the Chinese leadership the US was still the implacable enemy.

Like 9/11, Covid-19 must now force the West to wake up and fight back.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Coronavirus: Belgian Carnage by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on April 22nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15916/coronavirus-belgium-carnage

There were no masks, so the government decided to announce that no masks were needed. This supreme culmination of the ineptitude of the Belgian government still can be found online on the personal website of Health Minister Maggie De Block: “Wearing masks to protect yourself from the coronavirus makes little sense”.

No masks, no screening, almost no tests and people left to die in nursing homes — that has been Belgium’s situation in the middle of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Influenza of 1918. This Belgian carnage is entirely due to the tragic incompetence of the Belgian governing “elites” — and was completely avoidable.

It is too soon to make a final assessment on the management of COVID-19 by the countries of the world, but one thing is sure: Belgium is in the middle of a great carnage.

It all began in 2015, when the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel (today’s European Council president) decided to destroy Belgium’s entire “strategic stock” of 63 million protective face-masks, including the precious FFP2 type — 1,200 pallets carefully stored and guarded by the army in the Belgrade Barracks, in Namur. Because they were “out of date,” said Minister of Health Maggie De Block, who is still on the job today. “Not at all,” said the main union of the Belgian army, “these masks were incinerated… to ‘make room’ for housing refugees.” In 2015, Belgium and Europe were overwhelmed by migrants at the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the laws of the EU and the European Convention on Human Rights made it effectively impossible to reject them.

The entire strategic stock was thus incinerated, and never replaced — another decision of De Block, which, given the regularity of epidemics and pandemics, amounts to a crime. “To govern is to foresee”, said Emile de Girardin.