ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Republicans hold Senate primary candidate debate in Ohio: Democrats win By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on March 20th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/republicans_hold_senate_primary_candidate_debate_in_ohio_democrats_win.html

As my colleague Richard Baehr comments, this is a good way to lose what should be a pretty safe Senate seat, currently held by retiring Republican Rob Portman. Jordan Dixon-Hamilton writes in Breitbart:

At Ohio’s Republican Senate debate on Friday evening, chaos broke out when candidates Mike Gibbons and Josh Mandel got into a heated altercation, as J.D. Vance berated the two for conduct unbecoming.

Gibbons and Mandel got into a heated face-to-face altercation after Mandel accused Gibbons of making millions of dollars off of Chinese petroleum stock.

“You filed that with the federal elections committee, you own stock in Chinese petro,” Mandel told Gibbons.

“I personally didn’t buy the stock,” Gibbons replied. “You made millions off of it sir,” Mandel said

“I don’t think I’ve made millions off of anything,” Gibbons said. “I’d love to have made millions off of Chinese petro.”

The altercation increased in intensity after Gibbons claimed that Mandel had never worked in the private sector. “You may not understand this because you’ve never been— You’ve never been in the private sector in your entire life,” Gibbons told Mandel.

“I understand fully,” Mandel said as he stood up to get into Gibbons’s face. “I’ve worked. Two tours in Iraq, don’t tell me I haven’t worked,” Mandel said in reference to his military service.

There were actually 4 candidates for the primary onstage, with J.D. Vance and Jane Timken trailing frontrunners Gibbons and Mandel.  

As Kamala Harris would put it, “C’mon, guys!”  Don’t let your personal ambition overshadow the stakes here. The fate of the Republic is at stake.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ketanji Brown Jackson: A+ Credentials, D- Judge For Brown, politics trumps the law. Ken Sondik

Posted By on March 20th, 2022

https://spectator.org/ketanji-brown-jackson-a-credentials-d-judge/

Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett could only wish to have experienced a fraction of the media praise being heaped on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

If anything, it should be the other way around. President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointees showed immense legal ability and fidelity to the rule of law before joining the Court.

The politically incorrect truth is that President Joe Biden’s nominee, who is set to face Senate questioning on Monday, is a mediocre judge whose politics trump the law.

Let’s look at two cases Jackson handled as a district court judge, her job for eight years until being elevated to the D.C. Court of Appeals last year. The cases are among the highest-profile to have reached her court. They also involve immigration law, an area I write on.

MEDIA Comments turned off

How Dem officials, the media and Big Tech worked in concert to bury the Hunter Biden story By Kyle Smith

Posted By on March 20th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/how-big-tech-media-and-dems-killed-the-hunter-biden-story/

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.”

But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions.

These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

Now that the New York Times finally admits that the Hunter Biden laptop story is true, it’s time for everyone involved in suppressing it to be held to account.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Biden Administration’s Campaign to “Make Anti-American Dictatorships Great Again” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18335/anti-american-dictatorships

Buying oil from the mullahs of Iran means funding a regime that sponsors global terrorism and that is determined, as an oblation, to wipe out Israel and attack the US.

One day after the United Nations Security Council voted in favor of lifting the arms embargo on Iran in October 2020, the ruling mullahs unveiled a ballistic missile that reportedly can reach the United States. The headline of an August 15, 2020 report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News read in Farsi, “American Soil Is Now Within the Range of Iranian Bombs”.

The report boasted about the damage that the Iranian regime could inflict on the US: “By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian parliament had previously warned [the US] that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.” — Afkar News, August 15, 2020.

The report also threatened the EU, which voted for lifting an arms embargo against Iran: “The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit US bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, reportedly views Russia, China and Iran as “partners,” “competitors, or deal-makers.” Russia, China and Iran are not “partners”. They are not “competitors.” They are aggressors. You bet they would like to “help” the United States with “climate change” and “going green”: it would give them a vast new market for their oil and gas and as well as increased leverage over the West. European and the US reports already allege that Russian “dark money” (anonymous funding) has been going to Western non-governmental environmental groups to advance that agenda.

An America dependent for its oil and gas on anti-democratic dictatorships would be a windfall, economically and politically, beyond their dreams. Imagine an America reliant on the warmhearted goodwill of Russia and China.

Now, in the new “Iran deal,” it seems that not only has Russia been serving as the negotiator for the United States, and that the US has agreed to waive $10 billion in sanctions it just finished placing on Russia for having invaded Ukraine so that Russia will be able to build a nuclear plant in Iran, but also, according to Rep. Michael Waltz*, that all enriched uranium from Iran will now be sent to Russia. To top it off, according to Waltz, the new arbiter of whether or not Iran is in compliance with the deal, will be – Russia. What could possibly go wrong?

The West is in for yet another shock as the Biden administration seems to be turning to the Iranian regime — and approached the illegitimate government of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — to purchase their oil instead of increasing US domestic oil production.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

In New York City, the leftist war on children continues under a new health tsar By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/in_new_york_city_the_leftist_war_on_children_continues_under_a_new_health_tsar.html

If there are only two things that the last two years have taught us, they are (1) that young children do not get extremely sick or from COVID nor do they spread it, and (2) that cloth and paper masks are ineffectual against a virus. However, New York City’s new health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, doesn’t let little things like facts get in the way. He’s doubled-down on keeping children five and under smothered in masks for the indefinite future, even as mandates for adults are finally going away. Because there is no health reason behind it, the only reason, a sinister one, can be to train both children and their parents to obey the government at all times.

The Daily Mail has the story:

New York City‘s new health commissioner sparked outrage after announcing that children aged five and under should wear face masks indefinitely, bucking the national trend of ditching masks and going in the face of vast evidence that kids are at little risk from Covid-19.

‘I think it’s indefinite at this point,’ Dr. Ashwin Vasan said Friday during a COVID-19 briefing in Queens. ‘People who have tried to predict what’s going to happen in the future in this pandemic have repeatedly found egg on their face, as they say, and I’m not going to do that here today.’

The woke commissioner, who lives in Brooklyn with his partner and three children, including a four-year-old son, argued he wanted to mask children because under fives are not vaccinated.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How today’s ‘Diversity’ damages our military By Brig. Gen. Chris Petty

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/how_todays_diversity_damages_our_military.html

Diversity sounds great.  That’s part of the problem.  Today’s “diversity,” however, isn’t what it used to be.  Rather than diverse experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives — that promote healthy group decisions and outcomes ‒ “diversity” has come to mean only race, ethnicity, and gender.  Unfortunately, today’s “diversity” is replacing our long, and largely successful, journey towards equal opportunity.  We have moved the goalposts to the end of a new field — a field where equal racial and gender outcomes determine the score.  In this new world, “diversity” has become an end unto itself, undermining the purpose of our military: winning wars.  Here is why it is so damaging.

Today’s diversity advocates measure organizational success by race/ethnicity and gender — factors that have nothing to do with performance or potential.  Yet, they are influencing accessions, advancements, and promotions across the force.  Prioritizing racial and gender goals clearly undermines the importance of performance and merit.  Sadly, today’s military leaders are often downplaying talents, experience, and skills in favor of skin color and gender in their personnel decisions.  The result is a less capable force with less capable leaders.

This new push for diversity also destroys trust. When merit and performance are downplayed in the name of quotas and goals, excellence is undermined.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

First, Do Some Harm: Peachy Keenan

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/first-do-some-harm/

While we are finally starting to win the fight for our children’s minds, we are losing the battle for control of their bodies.

First, the good news. Recent legal wins over woke schools in Florida have the education industrial complex reeling. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis successfully banned his state’s education lunatics from “injecting,” as he likes to say with a twinkle in his eye, depraved gender poison into the state’s Kindergarten-through-3rd grade curriculum. This is the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” Act, which produced some hilarious meta-content, like braindead woke celebrities screeching “Gay!” repeatedly on social media.

Even better, the dead-eyed do-nothings who sit on school boards and the moldering teachers’ unions who control them are getting b*tch slapped—finally—by outraged parents who are taking the fight to them. The battle is over who, exactly, has control over a child’s mind. Until now, the people in full control of the minds of our youth have been the army of 31-year-old TikTok-and-Adderall addicts with multiple piercings and furry fetishes and baroque multisyllabic pronouns who seem to work at every preschool and elementary school in the country. I don’t know where these weirdos come from, but I want to thank the China-owned TikTok app for giving them a platform on which to expose themselves. 

These “teachers” get their jollies by stocking kindergarten bookshelves with dystopian titles like “She’s My Dad” and “I’m Not a Girl” and by instructing five-year-olds who barely know how to wipe themselves properly about how fun it is to touch their own private parts.

You should see what they do on Show-and-Tell day.

We are slowly chipping away at the rotted American education colossus. It feels good to notch a few Ws in our belt. Been awhile, right? 

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What Real Economic Warfare Looked Like Sanctions against Russia over Ukraine are mild compared with Britain’s effort against Germany before World War I. Nicholas Lambert

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-real-economic-warfare-looked-like-russia-ukraine-world-trade-great-britain-11647637729?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has accused the West of waging economic warfare. Many in the West have agreed, celebrating the supposedly unprecedented nature of Western sanctions as evidence that the West isn’t dead yet. But these claims on both sides are overwrought. There are precedents: The U.S. government froze the assets of Japan’s central bank in July 1941. And we could go back further still, to a time when the world knew better than it does today what this kind of warfare could achieve.

The only previous period when the world economy was as globalized as it is now was in the early 20th century, before World War I. Then as now, advanced industrial nations depended on access to the global trading system for sociopolitical stability. Globalization was characterized by high volumes of international trade, driven by cheap oceanic transportation and facilitated by cable and wireless communications and sophisticated financial instruments.

These made possible long-distance supply chains and just-in-time ordering (then known as “hand to mouth”). The system lowered costs and reduced consumer prices, but it was fragile. If an economic shock occurred, its effects were bound to propagate swiftly throughout the entire system. All of this should sound familiar.

Britain, the hegemon of the day, had a uniquely powerful capacity to turn the propagation of shock to its advantage. British companies dominated the infrastructure of the global trading system: international financial services, shipping and telecommunications. Taking what would now be called a “whole of government” approach, the British government realized the strategic opportunity latent in this dominance well before 1914 and planned accordingly.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Finally News Fit to Print The press that ignored the story in 2020 admits that it’s real.

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/all-the-news-thats-finally-fit-to-print-hunter-biden-laptop-new-york-post-new-york-times-joe-biden-11647637814?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“The emails make clear that Hunter was cashing in on the Biden name, including as a board member of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. That influence-peddling was a potential political liability for Mr. Biden, which was why the facts deserved an airing before the election. They are still relevant, especially with U.S.-China relations so fraught.”

Talk about burying the lead—for 17 months. The New York Times has finally acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s business dealings are legitimate news. Implicit apology accepted.

The Times waddled in this week with a story on the “tax affairs” of the President’s son, including this gem in the 24th paragraph: “Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”

You don’t say. This admission comes six months after a Politico writer published a book that also confirmed that the laptop emails were authentic. But the original scoop belonged to the New York Post, which broke its laptop story in October 2020—only to meet a media wall of denial and distortion.

Rather than attempt to confirm the emails, nearly all of the media at the time ignored the story or “fact-checked” it as false. This in-kind contribution to candidate Joe Biden was all the more egregious given other evidence supporting the Post’s scoop. Neither Hunter Biden nor the Biden campaign denied that the laptop was Hunter’s. And Hunter’s former business partner, Tony Bobulinski, went public with documents backing up some of the laptop’s contents.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Eliminating Dr. Doom’s Job Rand Paul introduces an amendment. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on March 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/eliminating-dr-dooms-job-lloyd-billingsley/

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief.’ No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans.”

That was Sen. Rand Paul and the dictator is Biden advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968 and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

Paul, a physician for more than 33 years, has “never encountered someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is, until Dr. Fauci became the COVID dictator-in-chief.” Paul mourns “those we lost to the crushing and overbearing lockdowns and mandates that were based on junk science.”

Paul will introduce an amendment to eliminate Fauci’s NIAID position and establish three new institutes headed by presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, and serving a term of five years. As Paul explains, “my amendment, which will get a vote this week, will finally force accountability and fire Dr. Fauci.” Such a move is long overdue, and the timing is right.

“You may be done with COVID,” Fauci told reporters last month,  “but COVID is not done with the United States, nor is COVID done with the world.” Fauci’s dictatorial clout, coupled with junk science, empowers the NIAID boss to fulfill his own prophecy.