ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Here’s why Democrats’ chances of winning in November are slipping Chris Cillizza Analysis by Chris Cillizza,

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/16/politics/house-democrats-retirements/index.html

House Democrats are retiring in numbers not seen in decades as a dire political outlook, new district lines and a negative environment at the US Capitol have combined into a toxic brew for lawmakers considering their political futures.

On Tuesday, New York Rep. Kathleen Rice became the 30th Democrat to announce plans to not seek re-election in 2022. By comparison, only 13 House Republicans are planning to call it quits or seek higher office.
“I entered public service 30 years ago and never left,” said Rice of her decision. “I have always believed that holding political office is neither a destiny nor a right. As elected officials, we must give all we have and then know when it is time to allow others to serve.”
The 30 House Democratic retirements are the most for the party since 1992, when a whopping 41(!) Democrats walked away from their seats. If one more House Democrat retires before the election, the 2022 cycle will tie the 1976 and 1978 election cycles as the second most retirements in modern history for the party, with 31. Democrats have already seen more retirements in this cycle than the last two elections combined.

Amy Walter, the editor of the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan campaign tip sheet, cites three main reasons for the Democratic exodus. First, she told me the national environment; “it’s bad out there for Democrats,” she said. Second, the weight of history; “they all know that it’s hard for party in White House to pick up seats. They can only afford to lose 5. They can do math.” And, finally the “environment” in the Capitol itself; “Talk to any member or staffer and they’ll tell you morale is low. It’s a combination of January 6th, a lack of civility, plus a frustration with a fact that most legislation is leadership driven instead of member driven.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Will Xi Jinping’s ‘End of Days’ Plunge China and the World into War? by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18231/xi-jinping-china-war

Xi Jinping, China’s mighty-looking leader, has an “enormous array of domestic enemies.” — Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, to Gatestone Institute, February 2022.

Xi created that opposition. After becoming China’s ruler at the end of 2012, he grabbed power from everyone else and then jailed tens of thousands of opponents in purges, which he styled as “anti-corruption” campaigns.

Beijing is panicking, adding nearly a trillion dollars in total new credit last month, a record increase…. When the so-called “hidden debt” is included, total debt in the country amounts to somewhere in the vicinity of 350% of gross domestic product.

Not surprisingly, Chinese companies are now defaulting. The debt crisis is so serious it can bring down China’s economy—and the country’s financial and political systems with it.

In the most recent hint of distress, “Fang Zhou and China”… wrote a 42,000-character essay titled “An Objective Evaluation of Xi Jinping.” The anti-Xi screed, posted on January 19 on the China-sponsored 6park site, appears to be the work of several members of the Communist Party’s Shanghai Gang faction, headed by former leader Jiang Zemin. Jiang’s faction has been continually sniping at Xi and now is leading the charge against him.

Xi’s problems, unfortunately, can become our problems. He has, for various internal political reasons, a low threshold of risk and many reasons to pick on some other country to deflect elite criticism and popular discontent.

The Communist Party of China has always believed its struggle with the United States is existential—in May 2019 the official People’s Daily declared a “people’s war” on America—but the hostility has become far more evident in the past year.

Virulent anti-Americanism suggests Xi Jinping is establishing a justification to strike America. The Chinese regime often uses its media to first warn and then signal its actions.

America has now been warned.

When truckers took over Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and shut down border entry points to America, some called it a “nationwide insurrection.” Mass demonstrations have occurred across the democratic world. People have had enough of two years of mandates and other disease-control measures.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Forbes Contributor Fired Over Investigative Stories On Fauci Tyler Durden’s Photo by Tyler Durden

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/forbes-contributor-fired-over-investigative-stories-fauci

Adam Andrzejewski, founder of OpenTheBooks.com and a frequent guest contributor to Zero Hedge (who most certainly does not get his talking points from the KGB), and who was also – until very recently – a contributor to Forbes, told Tucker Carlson on Monday that he was terminated from the magazine over his coverage of NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Andrzejewski, who recently made headlines with his investigative reporting that Fauci was the highest paid employee in the entire US Federal government, described how he was targeted for being critical of Dr. Anthony Fauci and exposing his yearly earnings.

“The National Institutes of Health’s six top executives wrote an e-mail to myself and Randall Lane, the top content officer at Forbes. It was couched as a corrections e-mail, but there were no substantial corrections and they quibbled about small things in my column. But that was the excuse Forbes used to cancel it,” Andrzejewski said.

He explained that within 24 hours of the email, he received a call that told him he was barred from publishing any additional material regarding Fauci.

Andrzejewski originally filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on Jan. 28, 2021 regarding Fauci’s annual pay. After receiving only redacted documents, his group OpenTheBooks.com filed suit on Oct. 25. This led to the National Institute of Health agreeing to release its extensive documents but only incrementally over the next 14 months due to backed-up requests.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wholesale prices jump 9.7% in January, further evidence of red-hot inflation Economists expected producer prices to jump 0.5% in January from previous month By Megan Henney

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/producer-prices-inflation-january-2022

Wholesale prices accelerated again in January as strong consumer demand and pandemic-related supply chain snarls continued to fuel the highest inflation in decades.

The Labor Department said Tuesday that its producer price index, which measures inflation at the wholesale level before it reaches consumers, surged 9.7% in January from the year-ago period, slightly below the 12-year high of 9.8% notched in November and December. But in an unexpected turn, prices rose 1% in January on a monthly basis – well above the revised gain of 0.4% in December.

Economists surveyed by Refinitiv expected producer inflation to rise by 9.1% on an annual basis and 0.5% from the previous month.

Core inflation at the wholesale level, which excludes the more volatile measurements of food and energy, increased 0.9% for the month, well above the 0.4% estimate. Over the past 12 months, core prices were up 6.9% – nearly matching the record level hit in 2021.

INFLATION PROBABLY COSTING MOST AMERICANS AN EXTRA $276 A MONTH

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Durham Filing Clears the Path for More Indictments in Clinton-Financed Russia Hoax Increasingly, the intelligence community seems not to care or notice whether the American public trusts it. By Adam Mill

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/15/new-durham-filing-clears-the-path-for-more-indictments-in-clinton-financed-russia-hoax/

The story was bizarre, confusing to the point of incoherence, but nevertheless added to a growing constellation of Trump/Russia collusion stories that called into question Trump’s independence as a candidate. In the closing days of the 2016 election, Slate published two articles by Franklin Foer purporting to expose a channel of communication between the Trump campaign and Russia-based Alfa Bank. 

According to the Foer articles, a group of “concerned scientists,” set to work investigating whether Russia launched a cyberattack on the Republican Party like the one that reportedly struck the Democratic National Committee in late 2015 or early 2016. The concerned scientists operated under the pseudonym, “Tea Leaves,” in part to protect their “relationship with the networks and banks that employ [one of the “scientists”] to sift their data.” The article alleged, “the logs suggested that Trump and Alfa had configured something like a digital hotline connecting the two entities, shutting out the rest of the world, and designed to obscure its own existence.”

In September, Special Counsel John H. Durham signed an indictment charging Michael A. Sussmann, a former Perkins Coie attorney, with lying to the FBI while promoting the Alfa Bank smear. Sussmann denied having an interest in the story when in fact he was directly working on Clinton’s Trump/Russia collusion hoax. 

Contrary to the Slate stories, the Tea Leaves “scientists” were not disinterested, nonpartisan patriots analyzing publicly available data. One of these “scientists,” identified by Durham as “Tech Executive-1,” “exploited his access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” including data obtained, “in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity research contract.” 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Staff and Anti-Israel Bias A poisonous environment that reflects a global phenomenon. Adam Milstein, James Jay Carafano and Elan S. Carr

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/university-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-staff-frontpagemagcom/

A recent Heritage Foundation study found strong anti-Israel bias in the social media posts of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) officials at colleges and universities throughout the United States. These officials criticize Israel far more frequently and far more severely than they do China. Their posts about Israel exceed those mentioning China by a factor of three, and almost all of their statements about Israel express condemnation, whereas nearly two-thirds of their comments on China convey praise.

These disturbing findings should surprise no one. U.S. campuses have become hotbeds of hostility toward the state of Israel as well as toward the idea of American exceptionalism, and in the radical religion of the campus, far-left professors are the priests and DEI officers are the choir.

This religion has its orthodoxies: America is systemically racist and defined by perpetual struggle of oppressed against oppressors; “white privilege”—for which Jews should be regarded as an exemplar—is a chief source of oppression, and status-based intersectional categories of victimhood confer both justness and entitlement. Under this neo-Marxist paradigm, there is no hint of irony when officials putatively devoted to fostering “diversity” and “inclusion” instead promote hostility toward Israel or regard as obnoxious the idea that the allegedly privileged Jewish people have a right to national self-determination in their ancient homeland.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bidenflation Continues to Surge Out of Control But the president says Americans should have “peace of mind.” Joseph Klein

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/bidenflation-continues-surge-out-control-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden’s runaway inflation train continues hurtling out of control. The Labor Department reported on February 10th that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 7.5% in January compared to the CPI level a year ago – the highest rate of increase in four decades. Excluding gas and grocery prices, the core CPI measure increased 6%.

But not to worry, said Biden. “The fact is we’re in a situation now where you should have peace of mind,” Biden declared at an event he attended in Virginia on the same day that the spiraling CPI inflation increase was announced. Americans struggling to make ends meet every day, fill their gas tanks, and put food on the table would beg to differ. They do not have “peace of mind.”

Indeed, Americans suffering through the Bidenflation are giving Biden a deserved piece of their minds. Recent poll numbers show that a majority of Americans are not happy at all with how President Biden is handling the economy, or much else for that matter.

Americans are tuning out the Biden administration’s attempt to change the subject with happy talk about robust job data. With the prices they pay for food, gas, and other necessities growing faster over the last year than the growth of their wages, the economic conditions many Americans are experiencing remain bleak.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden, Crack Pipes and the China Link Who actually benefits? And why? Joseph Hippolito

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/biden-crack-pipes-joseph-hippolito/

Two weeks before Presidents’ Day and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a conservative outlet exposed perhaps the most singularly idiotic decision since the Constitution mandated the Executive Branch.

On Feb. 7, the Washington Free Beacon reported that Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services made $29.25 million in grants available to government agencies and community groups to purchase syringes, fentanyl strips and “smoking kits” — also known as crack pipes — for drug prevention programs. HHS’s stated goal was to reduce the addicts’ risk of contracting substance abuse disorders or sexually transmitted diseases.

In other words, the virtual president’s “administration” wants to enable illicit drug use for the sake of public health.

“Unsafe smoking practices can lead to open sores, burns and cuts on the lips, and can increase the risk of infection among people who smoke drugs,” HHS spokesman Chris Garrett told the Free Beacon. “Safe smoking kits have been identified to reduce the spread of disease.”

Public outcry forced the HHS to reverse its course on crack pipes Feb. 9. Yet this play from the theater of the absurd contains a second act.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier Departs But not before flagging Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “decades of lies.” Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/nobel-laureate-luc-montagnier-departs-lloyd-billingsley/

“Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote that ‘a lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.’ Tragically for humanity, there are many, many untruths emanating from Dr. Fauci and his minions. RFK Jr. exposes the decades of lies.”

That was Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, the French medical scientist who died last week at 89, in his cover endorsement of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Montagnier also shows up in the chapter, “Pandemic Template: AIDS and AZT.” During the 1980s, Montagnier was director of the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute, where he discovered the human immunodeficiency virus known as HIV.

As Kennedy shows, American researcher Robert Gallo “pilfered Montagnier’s discovery,” and claimed that the retrovirus was the sole cause of AIDS. On the other hand, Harvard molecular biologist Charles Thomas, biochemist and Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, and UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and recipient of an Outstanding Investigator grant, had never seen a retrovirus with such destructive capabilities.

As Duesberg wondered, “What kind of virus, one day, out of nowhere, springs into action to destroy a person’s immune system with no provocation?” Never had a retrovirus been shown to cause a human disease, or even a disease in animals.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California Tyrants-Only the Vaxxed Can Work

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/16/california-tyrants-self-identify-only-the-vaxxed-can-work/

It’s not law yet, but there is legislation in California that requires all workers, even independent contractors, to take the coronavirus vaccine. This deserves all of the outrage, scorn, and resistance that the liberty-minded in the state, and elsewhere, can muster.

But in California, where Democrats are accustomed to get nearly everything they want, that might not be enough.

“Long-awaited workplace coronavirus vaccine mandate legislation drops today,” Politico reported Last week. “The sweeping bill from Assembly member Buffy Wicks would apply to all employees and independent contractors, regardless of how big their employer is, and threatens penalties to noncompliant businesses.”

Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, must have missed the truckers in Canada whose fuse was lit by a government vaccine mandate, as well as the Biden White House’s failure – thanks to the Supreme Court – to force businesses to require employees to be vaccinated and regularly tested. But then, she is a lawmaker in California, a one-party state whose “leaders” care little about individual freedom. She is also a member of the party whose voters “support harsh measures” against the unvaccinated.