Displaying posts published in

February 2020

Coronavirus Live Updates-HONG KONG, JAPAN, PHILIPPINES, THAILAND

https://www.theepochtimes.com/coronavirus-live-updates-south-korea-singapore-japan-report-new-infections_3240306.html

Countries around the world are taking measures to stem the spread of the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, as the death toll continues to rise.

One New Infection in Hong Kong

A 69-year-old retired man who lives in Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O has contracted COVID-19, according to Chuang Shuk-kwan, head of the Communicable Disease Branch of the Center for Health Protection.

The man, who already had diabetes and high blood pressure before being tested positive for the virus, had not traveled outside Hong Kong recently. He was hospitalized on Feb. 16.

The new case brings Hong Kong’s known cases of coronavirus to 58.

Chuang added that there are also two cases with preliminary test results showing that they have been infected. One is a 45-year-old man who is a coworker of the 69-year-old retired man.

Another case involves the wife of an infected patient.

China’s Legislative Meeting Could Be Delayed

The 13th National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp legislature, could delay its upcoming annual session that is scheduled for March 5, state-run media Xinhua reported on Monday.

The annual political meeting is one of the biggest held by the Chinese regime.

The standing committee of the NPC will hold its 16th bi-monthly session on Feb. 24 in Beijing. According to Xinhua, the committee is expected to consider postponing the annual session.

Despite What You’ve Heard, Bloomberg Is No Centrist John Merline

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/17/despite-what-youve-heard-bloomberg-is-no-centrist/

Michael Bloomberg has been blanketing the airwaves with ads that tout his up-by-his-bootstraps success, his can-do attitude, his supposed ability to unite the country. “Mike can get it done,” the ads declare, without indicating what “it” is.

Bloomberg’s spending spree has not only been translating into a rise in the polls, it’s cementing his claim to be a centrist, at least among pundits. Even on the right, that’s how he’s being described.

The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin called him “the great centrist hope for Democrats to defeat Trump.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan opined recently that “Biden’s collapse created a vacuum in the center, and the former mayor has the money and will to fill it.”

Has anyone calling Bloomberg a centrist bothered to look at his campaign website, rather than just listen to his campaign ads?

On issue after issue, Bloomberg is as radical, or slightly less so, than socialist Bernie Sanders. In fact, on taxes, health care, the environment, gun control, there is little light between the two.

Here’s a rundown.

Reaching Peak Progressivism The frightening visions of the new peak progressives will ensure the reelection of Donald Trump, as well as either the likely end of themselves—or else a collective dystopian nightmare. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/16/reaching-peak-progressivism/

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in the ground. While the idea of peak oil in the days before fracking and horizontal drilling proved vastly premature, we likely are witnessing something like “peak progressivism” today.

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether.

The French Revolution hit “peak” coerced egalitarianism with the Jacobin takeover and so-called Reign of Terror. After all, when you begin guillotining fellow travelers on charges they are counterrevolutionaries and begin worshiping a new atheist secular power “Reason,” institutionalized as Robespierre’s “Cult of the Supreme Being,” you have mostly reached the limits of political radicalism and are into the territory of the nihilistic, if not the maniacal and absurd—with a rendezvous with Napoleon on the horizon.

From 2009 through 2016, Barack Obama recalibrated the Democratic Party’s liberalism into progressive radicalism. He opened the border and all but dismantled existing immigration law. Sanctuary cities sprang up with impunity. Executive orders bypassed the Congress. The Iran Deal ignored the Senate’s treaty-making responsibilities. Obama sought to nationalize healthcare. The concept of “diversity” replaced affirmative action, by redefining racial oppression as distinct from historical grievance and economic disparity and instead lumping together 30 percent of the population as nonwhite, and thus antithetical to the new buzz construct of “white privilege.” Fast and Furious, the surveillance of the Associated Press reporters, Benghazi, the weaponization of the IRS, and the use of CIA, FBI, and DOJ to seed the spurious Steele dossier were all written off as proof of the “most scandal free” administration in memory.

A Two-Year Terror Campaign Against One Small GOP Office Anyone who wants to take away your rights can also put a rock through your window.Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/two-year-terror-campaign-against-one-small-gop-daniel-greenfield/

Early Saturday morning, a bearded perpetrator in a hooded jacket, wearing gloves, smashed the glass door and windows of the Humboldt Republican headquarters with rocks. He poured an unknown liquid into the storefront office before escaping on a bike into the streets of Eureka in the pre-dawn hours.

There was one obvious clue. The bike had a giant BERNIE sticker on it.

When police caught up to the alleged perpetrator, Michael Valls attempted to escape on his bike, then he tried throwing the bike at the cops, and, when he was finally taken into custody, gave authorities a false name. But police caught him with the Trump flag that he had stolen from the vandalized office.

The Bernie Sanders supporter was charged with burglary, felony vandalism, attempted arson, resisting arrest, and providing a false name. The chemical liquid he had poured inside the office turned out to be flammable. Bail was set at only $25,000, and Valls was out of prison by Sunday. It is California after all.

And in an atmosphere of rising radical violence, maybe this story wouldn’t be so extraordinary.

But this wasn’t the first time that this happened to the Humboldt GOP HQ. It was the sixth time.

Not in a decade, but in only two years.

Court Caves to CAIR Again Case against Hamid Hayat dismissed “due to the passage of time.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/court-caves-cair-again-lloyd-billingsley/

“Due to the passage of time, the government now moves this Court to dismiss, in the interest of justice, the indictments in this case,” the office of U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott declared Friday. That meant that the U.S. Attorney would not seek a new trial for Hamid Hayat of Lodi, California, convicted on terrorist charges in 2006.

“There aren’t words to express how relieved we are that Hamid is finally going to be truly free,” said Sacramento Valley CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra in a statement. “An innocent man spent nearly 14 years in prison, a family was torn apart and an entire community was left traumatized due to prosecution taking advantage of anti-Muslim, post-9/11 hysteria.” As the U.S. Attorney also indicated, the CAIR boss was overlooking a few realities.

On July 30, 2019, the District Court entered an order, “vacating defendant Hamid Hayat’s conviction and sentence, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had earlier affirmed.” The Ninth Circuit is the most liberal appeal court in the nation.

In 2006, federal judge Garland E. Burrell sentenced Hamid Hayat to 24 years in prison for, as the U.S. Department of Justice explained, “a series of terrorism charges related to his 2003/2004 attendance at a jihadi training camp in Pakistan and his 2005 return to the United States with the intent to wage violent jihad.”

The Palestinians’ Factory of Israeli Atrocities Many of the college students who’ve been brainwashed to hate Israel have been fed its lies. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/palestinians-factory-israeli-atrocities-robert-spencer/

Israelly Cool reported Tuesday that Palestinian “journalist” Mustafa Batnain tweeted a “heartbreaking photo from Gaza” depicting a baby inside a cardboard box, presumably the little one’s only shelter amid rampaging, savage, brutal IDF forces. There was just one catch: the photo was actually not from Gaza at all, but from Idomeni, Greece. It’s all in a day’s work for the Palestinian factory of Israeli atrocities.

The photo was just the latest of innumerable examples of the deception that is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. Discover the breadth and sophistication of this deception, and its deleterious international effects, in The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process.

But all of this atrocity manufacturing makes the question inescapable: if Gaza is really so terrible, why all the fakery? Why is it so hard to find authentic photos showing the actual misery of the people?

1,100 former federal prosecutors and DOJ officials demand Barr’s resignation By Andrea Widburg

What we’re seeing here is the fruit of the corruption of America’s institutions of higher education, ensuring that the educated classes are dedicated socialists.

Roger Stone, a nasty, sleazy person who refused to participate in the Russian hoax, was convicted of lying to Congress and making ill-tempered threats that his “victim” found laughable. He was a first-time, non-violent, elderly offender so, of course, prosecutors tied to Bob Mueller decided to pay exquisite homage to the letter of the law, without reference to the spirit, and demanded of the judge that Stone get 7-9 years in prison. Political leakers and hardcore criminals get shorter sentences. Insiders like Andrew McCabe don’t even get prosecuted.

When Trump learned about the prosecutors’ demands he posted a tweet calling out this travesty. Simultaneously, and completely separately from Trump’s angry tweets, Bill Barr also learned for the first time about the sentencing request and pulled it, instead asking the judge to exercise her discretion when it came to sentencing Stone. While all this was going on, it turned out that the jury foreman lied about her animus towards Trump and his circle, as well as her knowledge about and hostility towards Stone.

The Democrats hate Barr because they understand that he is focused on the law as it should be, not on politics as it is. With Barr applying common sense and rationality to an extreme and partisan attack on an old man, the leftists think they’ve got him:

More than 1,100 former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials called on Attorney General William P. Barr on Sunday to step down after he intervened last week to lower the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr.

Canada: A Totalitarian State-in-Progress By David Solway

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/canada_a_totalitarian_stateinprogress.html

To describe Canada as a totalitarian state-in-progress sounds like a gross and indeed absurd exaggeration. Yet many premonitory signs are present. In the words of political philosopher William Gairdner, author of The Book of Absolutes, The Great Divide and The Trouble with Canada, Canada “has just crossed the red line between soft-socialism and soft-totalitarianism.”

Gairdner has assembled a virtual mountain of evidence for his claim: Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “Inspectors,” that is, spies — wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay-equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families and shut down businesses, to impose prison time for contempt of court, and to compel conformity via “re-education.”

The list goes on. Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, which sounds unexceptionable except for the obvious fact that “discrimination” is in the eye of the offended beholder and the government enforcer. The bill effectively mandates that citizens must address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem” or “zeir” or you’re done for. It’s Emily, not Brian, or your job’s in peril. The Ontario Human Rights Code stipulates that “refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity… will likely be discrimination” in social areas like employment, housing, education and so on. As Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy writes, “human rights have become a weapon to normalize social justice values and delegitimize competing beliefs.” There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59,  C-75 and C-76 that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process and render government transparency a thing of the past.

Explosive Book Shows How FBI and Media Destroyed an Innocent Man By Elise Cooper

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/explosive_book_shows_how_fbi_and_media_destroyed_an_innocent_man.html

The Suspect by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen is a must-read book.  It details how Richard Jewell was accused of being the bomber at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.  Instead of being a hero for saving many lives, he became the main person of interest by the FBI and the press.  Former U.S. attorney Kent Alexander and former Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Salwen reconstruct all the events leading up to, during, and after the Olympic bombing, showing how much of the law enforcement evidence was ignored, mainly because of tunnel vision.

Elise Cooper: Why did you write it now?

Kent Alexander: I have wanted to write this book for over two decades, ever since delivering Richard Jewell’s clearance letter.  My coauthor Kevin Salwen and I started reporting and writing The Suspect in earnest five and a half years ago.  This past November, we were finally ready to publish.

EC: Do you think that Jewell is still considered by many a suspect?

KA: Not by many, but a few.  One of our main characters, former FBI Special Agent Don Johnson, went to his grave convinced Richard Jewell was complicit in the Olympic bombing.  He was wrong.

EC: Do you think the press and media made Jewell out to be not the brightest?

KA: Yes.  Richard was no academic or intellectual, but he was a law enforcement professional who took his job quite seriously.  Sometimes overly so.  He prided himself on having a “seventh sense” to detect danger, and thank goodness he did.  He saved countless lives.  Richard Jewell is a bona fide hero.

Hateful Anti-Zionism at Duke University Press avatar by Peter Reitzes

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/13/hateful-anti-zionism-at-duke-university-press/

Duke University Press has a long history of promoting antisemitic views masquerading as academic scholarship. Their authors have compared Israelis to Nazis, and have updated antisemitic blood libels by alleging that Israel specifically targets Palestinian children to maim them and then profits from their incurred disabilities.

As I previously wrote in 2018, seven members of Duke University Press (DUP)’s Editorial Advisory Board signed initiatives related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, and a number of Duke University Press editors publicly support the BDS movement. Duke University Press is recognized by some as the “publisher of choice” for those who support boycotting Israel.

Now, in early 2020, Duke University Press is signaling once again its commitment to targeting Israel by promoting an editor who is a self declared anti-Zionist, and who publicly uses language that many find offensive, antagonistic, and hateful.

In late January, Joshua Gutterman Tranen became Assistant Editor, and will be directly assisting Ken Wissoker, who is the Editorial Director. With this promotion, Tranen reports that he is now responsible for acquiring books for publication. The day before Tranen announced his promotion, his Twitter profile prominently stated he is an “anti-Zionist” working at “@dukepress.” The same day Tranen announced his promotion at Duke, he changed his Twitter profile by removing “anti-Zionist.” He did not, however, clean up his past tweets.

..