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Beijing’s attempts to elude blame for the Wuhan virus will backfire The Trump administration will vigorously defend itself against the CCP’s smear campaign Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://spectator.us/beijing-attempts-elude-blame-wuhan-virus-backfire/

Facing harsh criticism for allowing the novel coronavirus to spread, Beijing has settled on an international communications strategy: smearing the United States by claiming the virus originated with American soldiers visiting China. 

This strategy, based on obvious lies, will not work out well.

Nobody outside China’s state broadcasters and some information-starved viewers could possibly believe it. For good reason: it’s bunk, and vile bunk at that. An infected unicorn is more likely to have started the virus in Wuhan than the US military. Yet that is the story the Chinese Communist party (CCP) is trying to peddle.

 ‘The US pushed out the vaccine so quickly,’ said one ‘expert’ on Central China TV, ‘that only means they have been working on it way before the pandemic.’ The host played right along, ‘So we can conclude that the US had this virus in their possession long ago.’

Yeah, right.

Actually, there is no vaccine yet, though US, Canadian, European, Japanese and Israeli labs are working aggressively to invent one and to produce effective treatments. Nor would all the advanced economies have been forced to shut down if the United States had understood the virus well in advance. We didn’t. Chinese scientists in Wuhan were the first to get samples and when they decoded its genetic structure in early January, their laboratory was shut down. Beijing tried to destroy all their information, but some had fortunately been shared with US scientists before the intellectual iron curtain fell.

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Federal Prosecutors Drop Charges In Special Counsel’s Most Russia-Related Case For Collusion Ben Waeingarten

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/20/federal-prosecutors-drop-charges-in-special-counsels-most-russia-related-case-for-collusion/

he Mueller special counsel created a propaganda coup for Russia through pursuing a politicized indictment, seemingly to justify its existence, and very likely to the detriment of U.S. law.

Under cover of the wall-to-wall coverage of Chinese coronavirus, a central pillar of the already discredited Robert Mueller special counsel investigation has suffered a major blow, further exposing the miscarriage of, and disaster to, our justice system that it represented.

Federal prosecutors have dropped the charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States against two corporate defendants in the Russian “troll farm” case. That case hewed most closely to the special counsel’s mandate in that it showed Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, although absent “collusion” with Americans.

Recall that in the much-bandied-about case, the Robert Mueller special counsel team indicted 13 Russians and three corporate entities for “defrauding” the United States in allegedly engaging in a cartoonish, low-budget social media political memecampaign. The team presented the case as proof positive that the Russians worked to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election — although there has never been any proof Russia altered one vote nor evidence any American changed his or her vote due to seeing a crude Russian-created meme on social media.

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Trump’s approval rating soars during handling of Coronavirus The president’s approval rating now at 55 percent, shows new poll

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/trumps-approval-rating-soars-during-handling-coronavirus

New polling Friday showed President Trump’s approval ratings among Americans have soared during the coronavirus crisis, including his handling of the pandemic response and the economy

A new Axios-Harris poll, released Friday, showed the president with an 53 percent overall approval among U.S. adults surveyed March 17 and 18, compared to 49 percent among those polled March 14 and 15.

Fifty-six percent of respondents in the latest poll said they approved of the president’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, an increase from 51 percent last week. And 60 percent of Americans this week said they approved of the president’s handling of the economy, a slight increase from 59 percent last week. 

Despite stock market declines and rising unemployment figures released this week, the president’s approval rating for “Stimulating Jobs,” remained unchanged at 60 percent among both groups polled.

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Palestinian Leaders Use Coronavirus to Attack Israel by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15773/palestinian-leaders-coronavirus-israel

On March 18, Israel delivered hundreds of kits for detecting the coronavirus into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, together with equipment for medical protection. This is the same Gaza Strip from which Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups have been firing thousands of rockets at Israel for the past few years, and launching party-balloons carrying hidden bombs as recently as last week. In February alone, more than 40 rockets were launched into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian leaders, who are pursuing their efforts to prosecute Israelis for “war crimes,” have been concealing from their own people and the international community the fact that Israel is assisting them in the war on the coronavirus.

For Palestinian leaders, it seems that the war on Israel is more important than the battle against a pandemic and saving the lives of their own people. Yet, these leaders and their families, if they are diagnosed with the disease, will undoubtedly be the first to rush to Israel to seek medical treatment there.

What is the connection between US President Donald Trump’s recently unveiled plan for Middle East peace and the coronavirus?

Palestinian leaders seem to believe that there is a connection between the peace plan, also known as the Deal of the Century, and the coronavirus pandemic. According to these leaders, Israel is taking advantage of the health crisis to implement the Trump plan and build new housing units for Jews in the West Bank. They are referring to Israel’s intention to build a new road between the E1 area and Jerusalem, and 3,500 apartments in Ma’aleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem.

First, the building program in the area has been on the agenda for more than 20 years. All Israeli governments since Yitzhak Rabin’s second tenure as prime minister in the 1990s have supported it.

Second, the recent Israeli announcement was made in the last week of February, before the outbreak of the coronavirus in Israel and the West Bank. In fact, the announcement came on the eve of the March 3 election and was more likely a pledge from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral campaign.

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Me-Too Republicans for Biden, the Boneless Wonder One wonders if a handful of smug, self-righteous Republicans can offset the loss of Sanders supporters in a contest against Trump. By Mackubin Owens

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/19/me-too-republicans-for-biden-the-boneless-wonder/

Apparently the Sanders revolution within the Democratic Party has petered out, at least for the time being.

Sanders has not withdrawn but the most recent round of voting in the Democratic primaries appears to have doomed him and dashed the hopes of his many supporters. That is a godsend for the army of Republican NeverTrumpers who have sworn to vote for any Democrat because of their disdain for Donald Trump. At least they won’t have to vote for an avowed socialist—indeed a long-time champion of Communist dictatorships from the Soviet Union to Cuba and socialist authoritarian states such as Venezuela.

I have many NeverTrumper friends. Most of them are foreign policy and defense experts who reject Trump because of his character flaws and the threat he seems to pose to the business-as-usual foreign policies that these folks prefer.

As Sanders surged, I could sense panic among my NeverTrump Republican friends because voting for anyone but Trump might mean voting for Sanders. So concerned were they that many began to offer advice to the Democrats, a practice that was mocked by liberal commentators far and wide.

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Dangerous Curves by Julie Kelly : If this is the new normal, where incomplete data and media-fueled panic rule the day, that is an even more frightening prospect than what’s happening right now.

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/19/dangerous-curves/

If you weren’t very ill in late January or February, you probably know someone who was. The complaints often sounded the same: A fever for days, a stubborn and unusual-sounding cough, a persistent sore throat—the severity of the symptoms seemed worse than the usual influenza.

Doctors, assuming it was a version of the seasonal flu, administered flu-fighting drugs without testing. (My college daughter was very sick with the same symptoms; her flu test was negative.) Plenty of afflicted Americans just stayed in bed without ever seeing a physician.

Obviously, anecdotal evidence that the COVID-19 illness has been around for at least the past few months isn’t enough to make the case that there’s a chance the worst days of the outbreak are behind, not ahead, of us. But data from the Centers for Disease Control seems to support the possibility that the country has been besieged by the novel coronavirus since the start of 2020.

And while political leaders and medical experts push for more and more draconian measures to “flatten the curve,” it raises some questions. Are we looking at the right “curve?” And how accurate is the current curve if it doesn’t include possible cases before the height of the hysteria began in late February and early March?

MEDIA Comments turned off

In a time of crisis, CNN turns to a real expert in crisis management: Sean Penn By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/in_a_time_of_crisis_cnn_turns_to_a_real_expert_in_crisis_management_sean_penn.html

Sean Penn has always been an odd bird. He’s a very talented actor who, in common with Hollywood’s other leftists,  has an affinity for dictators. No one should forget how he cuddled up to Hugo Chavez, the dictator who set Venezuela on its socialist path. However, to his credit, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Penn did rouse himself to help with the relief effort and seems to have made a difference.

Haiti aside, Penn is not a very serious or even a very coherent person. Nevertheless, as part of its town hall on coronavirus, which Anderson Cooper and Sanjay Gupta hosted, CNN invited Sean Penn to talk about how the federal government should handle the virus. The preceding sentence is not from The Babylon Bee. It’s the truth. Penn is now a pandemic expert.

If you go to CNN’s website, you can see the segment in which Penn speaks fondly of the aide the military provided, and he deserves credit for showing respect to our military. If you don’t want to go to CNN’s website, though, here’s just a snippet:

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Justin Trudeau’s Canada Is Obama’s Dream for America By David Solway

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/justin_trudeaus_canada_is_obamas_dream_for_america.html

To adapt a phrase from Matt Margolis, Justin Trudeau is the worst Prime Minister in Canadian history. Like his American counterpart Barack Obama, he is both a know-nothing and a do-nothing leader, and an unmitigated disaster to the well-being of his country. For example, Trudeau’s unconscionably late and incomplete response to the COVID-19 pandemic — the “19” tells us it has been known for quite some time — much like Obama’s delayed response to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and his determination to keep an illegal border crossing open, are only the latest of his ill-gotten political escapades.                                                                 

Indeed, like the Obama of 57 states and the Austrian language, Justin Trudeau is a full-blown ignoramus masking as an intellectual prodigy. Former National Post and Walrus editor Jonathan Kay, who acted as an “editorial assistant” for Trudeau’s memoir Common Ground, swooned over his book-lined shelves. “Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know,” Kay fawned, even if his “boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated.” Trudeau is indeed intellectually unsophisticated — not that there is anything wrong with that, but there is something wrong with pretending to know more than one does.

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The Trap of White Privilege, and Rejecting the Cult of Victimology I am not a problem to be solved. Jason D. Hill *****

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/trap-white-privilege-and-rejecting-cult-jason-d-hill/

In thirty-four years of living in America, I have never faced the problem of radical racial resistance from committed individualists, many of whom fall within the conservative camp. They have mostly accepted me as an individual and treated me as an equal. My race to them was neither a qualifier nor a disqualifier, but a sociological marker which, as far as I could tell, was irrelevant to how I performed. In my experience with far-left progressives there exists an insidious racism that is often hard to diagnose. Their sense of their own whiteness required black helplessness and inadequacy to shore up a sense of guilt, which would then prompt action on their part, from which they could seek redemption and contrition.

There is unbridled hubris behind such psychic exploitation, because one needs to posit an inferior before one can masochistically experience redemption from some perceived wrong one has inflicted against another. That wrong, which the so-called progressive feels she or he has wielded, is white privilege.

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Thank you, Mr. President. Bruce Hendry

Posted By on March 20th, 2020

Donald Trump: A War HeroThank you, Mr. President.Bruce Hendry

Below is Part 9, the final part, of a new essay written by Bruce Hendry: Democrats, Progressives and Socialists. [See links to previous chapters below this article].

22. The Mueller Probe.

The Mueller investigation of whether Donald Trump or his associates colluded with the Russians to help him win the 2016 presidential election is finished. The story of this investigation is a living, current example of Alinsky-inspired Democratic tactics and is worth examining here.

The Mueller probe is perhaps the greatest political hoax in U.S. history.

Two parties conspiring to do an illegal act is a crime. Collusion is what we all do every day when talking with each other, and is not a crime. The press and their Democratic allies were careful not to use the word “conspiracy” in the charges because they knew from the beginning that there was no conspiracy, although in their attacks on Trump they used these terms interchangeably, and so in the public’s mind one was the same as the other. If they could get to prove the easier, but legal, charge of collusion, talking to Russians, they would have gained big political points that could be used against President Trump in the next election.