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Joe from Scranton? More like Bogus Biden His presidency is a slap in the face to the working class Amber Athey

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/scranton-joe-bogus-biden-inauthentic-presidency/

During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. “Joe from Scranton,” as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House.

I wrote last September that this characterization of the Syracuse law grad and lifelong politician was a sham: “Biden has built his career on being dishonest to working-class Americans,” I warned.

Ten months into his presidency, and this has proven true. Trump may love a good show  —”stay tuned!” — but it is Joe Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans.

The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks. Others have stumbled across even worse examples of the burgeoning crisis.

Inflation and shortages are no joke for working class families, who spend a larger percentage of their paycheck trying to keep their pantries stocked. The White House’s response, however, has been to deflect from how to fix the breakdown and instead mock Americans who are concerned that Santa may not be stuffing himself down the chimney this Christmas.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki snarked during a briefing this week that the supply chain chaos can be summed up by “the tragedy of the treadmill that’s delayed.” Chief of staff Ron Klain asserted on Twitter that inflation and shortages are “high class problems.” Psaki previously insisted that families aren’t comparing the cost of goods to pre-pandemic prices, saying, “We all understand the American people are not looking at cost-to-cost comparisons from this year to two years ago; they’re looking at cost-to-cost comparisons to their checkbooks from eight months ago or 12 months ago.” She made a patently false claim that gas prices are “well in line” with recent decades.

Then there was the defensiveness with which the administration responded to backlash over transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg taking two months of “paternity leave” with his newly adopted children while ports are backed up with shipping containers. Those who rightfully pointed out that Buttigieg either should have come back to work early or that the White House should have installed a temporary replacement were accused of not supporting paid parental leave or of being homophobic.

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Obama Gets Wrecked Over Lies About the ‘Culture Wars’ Katie Pavlich

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/10/25/obama-gets-wrecked-over-lies-about-virginia-governors-race-n2597954?utm_campaign=inarticle

Over the weekend, former President Barack Obama made a visit to Virginia and campaigned for flailing Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. 

During a campaign stop in Richmond, Obama claimed Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin and conservative media are waging “phony” culture wars. 

Obama’s remarks came shortly after it was revealed a girl was raped at a Loudoun County school by a “gender fluid” boy wearing a skirt. The boy was then quietly moved to another school, where he allegedly assaulted another student. The Loudoun County school board, which has been pushing transgender policies onto children and parents, knew about the situation and covered it up. 

To say the least, Obama’s remarks were unwelcome, out-of-touch and quickly refuted. 

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Schiff, Democrats Pivot Hard on Justice Department Election Interference Americans want, and expect, the Justice Department to operate free of political influence. But it is Democrats who torched the department’s credibility. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/25/schiff-democrats-pivot-hard-on-justice-department-election-interference/

For five years, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) insisted, without evidence, that the Russians helped Donald Trump win the White House in 2016. Schiff, along with Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), first seeded the collusion narrative in July 2016—the same month James Comey’s FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane—by falsely claiming Kremlin hackers confiscated thousands of emails off the Democratic National Committee’s server, correspondence damaging to Hillary Clinton.

From that point forward, Schiff leveraged his political power and newfound cable news stardom to perpetuate the lie that the 2016 presidential election was illegitimate.

So it’s beyond ironic that Schiff now sits on the January 6 select committee, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s latest weapon to annihilate TrumpWorld. After spending every waking minute during Trump’s presidency to conduct what author Lee Smith called The Permanent Coup, Schiff is flipping his coup-plotting script on anyone who questions the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s presidency.

What’s even more ironic is Schiff and the January 6 committee members now accuse Trump’s former Justice Department officials of attempting to “overturn the results” of the 2020 presidential election. After all, no other government organization aided Schiff more in his bug-eyed crusade to take down Donald Trump than the U.S. Department of Justice. (Comey, it’s helpful to recall, bolstered Schiff’s now-debunked accusation that the Russians hacked the DNC email system.)

Crossfire Hurricane—which involved FBI informants, a garbage “dossier” sourced by a DNC/Clinton campaign operative, and illicit FISA warrants authorized by top Justice Department officials—morphed into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, a two-year legal and political rampage that failed to unearth evidence of collusion but did plenty of damage to innocent people in the interim.

A cast of partisan characters—James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr, Rod Rosenstein, Kevin Clinesmith, to name just a few—held over from Obama’s Justice Department animated the nonstop siege against Trump and anyone in his orbit.

Even after Trump appointed William Barr attorney general in the spring of 2019, the department continued to play political games. Barr announced in October 2020 that a report from John Durham, the U.S. attorney investigating the corrupt origins of Crossfire Hurricane, would not be released before Election Day.

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Killer Cop Gets Off Light Minnesota does the Somali shuffle. By Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/25/killer-cop-gets-off-light/

Back in 2017, Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor gunned down Justine Ruszczyk Damond, who had called 911 to report a possible rape. In 2019, Noor was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to 12-and-a-half years in prison. On October 21, Judge Kathryn Quaintance resentenced Noor to just 57 months. These events invite a review of the case. 

The 40-year-old Damond, a dual citizen of Australia and the United States, heard a woman being assaulted and called 911. Officer Noor and partner Matthew Harrity failed to telephone Damond, who called 911 a second time to check on their arrival.

When Damond approached the police car, Noor suddenly drew his weapon and fired. The bullet struck an abdominal artery and the victim, who was to be married within a month, lost so much blood that prompt medical attention might not have saved her.

The Somali-born Noor, who had been on the force for two years, claimed he fired to protect the life of his partner. Three days after the shooting, Harrity claimed he heard a loud bang on the squad car. None of the forensic evidence showed that the victim had even touched the car. 

“The use of force was objectionable, unreasonable and violated police policies and training,” expert witness Derrick Hacker testified during the trial in April 2019. “No reasonable officer would have perceived a threat by somebody coming up to their squad.” Expert witness Timothy Longo told the court that a string of bad decisions led to the shooting death. “I don’t believe they were logical or rational at all,” Longo explained. “This was an unprovoked, violent response.” 

Noor’s attorney, Thomas Plunkett, told the court that what “really caused” the shooting was “the fear that continues to permeate our society. The police are afraid of the people, the people are afraid of the police.” The Minneapolis jury didn’t buy it. 

Six of the 12  jurors, including two women, were people of color. They took less than 12 hours to find Noor guilty of third-degree murder. Damond’s family was satisfied with the verdict, and the city of Minneapolis agreed to a $20 million settlement with the victim’s family. 

Noor’s cousin Goth Ali told reporters the sentence was “an injustice” and charged that Noor “didn’t get a fair trial.” The Somali-American Police Association (SAPA) said in a statement, “The institutional prejudices against people of color, including officers of color, have heavily influenced the verdict of this case.” In this case, the “officer of color” was the shooter, and the victim a person of pallor. 

As it turned out, Noor’s prison term was the average sentence for a cop convicted of a murder committed on duty. In Colorado, James Ashby received a 16-year sentence for killing Jack Jacquez after a confrontation in 2014. Roy Oliver, the Texas officer who shot Jordan Edwards, 15, was sentenced to 15 years.

On February 1, 2021 a Minnesota appeals court upheld Mohamed Noor’s murder conviction. On September 15, the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed Noor’s murder conviction, arguing that, since the officer directed his actions at a specific person, third-degree murder didn’t fit the case. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia Law Professor Explains Why Public Schools Are Tearing America Apart ‘[T]he schools remain a means by which some Americans force their beliefs on others,’ Philip Hamburger writes. ‘That’s why they are still a source of discord.’By Joy Pullmann

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/25/columbia-law-professor-explains-why-public-schools-are-tearing-america-apart/

Smearing parents fed up with their kids’ schools as “domestic terrorists” seems to be a wild, incendiary charge with little basis in reality. Yet it’s the basis on which the U.S. attorney general has convened an FBI task force to surveil and intimidate parents who object to what their children are being taught, and how they are being treated, with public tax dollars. The organization that colluded with the Justice Department to create the pretext for chilling voters’ speech has backed down, but the FBI threat remains.

School lockdowns have clarified and accelerated the deep, irreconcilable differences among American parents and citizens about how to educate children. Americans want completely different things from their kids’ schools, often opposite things. It’s simply impossible to teach both that there’s a hierarchy of races and that all humans are created equal, let alone to teach “both sides” of other education flashpoints, such as whether to teach social justice or actual math in math class. Schools have to choose.

K-12 schools are largely choosing the political establishment over the wishes of the people who elect them and provide their children as the pretext for schools’ public funding. The political establishment that benefits from public schools’ monopoly on teaching future voters what to think is being increasingly direct about this arrangement.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton told Americans “it takes a village” to raise a child. That was the soft sell. Today, we’re getting the hard sell: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a September debate.

As Democrats were forcing millions of American children to stay home for yet another school year while their international peers were safely learning in person, a Harvard University conference suggested banning at-home education. One of its organizers, a Harvard Law professor complained that homeschooling is “a realm of near-absolute parental power. . . . inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights of children.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Antarctica’s Record Lows Get the Cold, Cold Shoulder Michael Kile

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/10/dont-notice-the-antarctic-temperature-reord/

Last winter, in one of the bleakest places on earth after Canberra and Belushya Guba, a novel hypothesis was proposed by a  rogue researcher in lockdown: the more anthropogenic hot air spoken in the northern hemisphere before a United Nations climate conference, the colder it becomes in the southern hemisphere, especially at the South Pole.

The conjecture has yet to be validated by a peer-reviewed article in Nature Climate Change. Nevertheless, a lot of people – especially the self-appointed guardians of truth who call out “fake news” and “misinformation” — hope it never reaches that learned journal, and certainly not the smartphones or Twitter accounts of apoplectic activists and hysterical weather-worriers. They would prefer it just goes away and does not linger like a bad smell; or is buried deep under Antarctic snow and ice, with or without the perpetrator, before the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) begins in Glasgow-on-Clyde in November, with or without President Xi (editor’s note: Xi isn’t going, preferring to laugh at the participants from a distance.)

Yet the supporting evidence is impressive.

As for the second part, global warming took a long winter vacation, at least in Antarctica.

The Antarctic interior recorded its coldest April-to-September this year since records began in 1957. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), the average temperature at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was minus 60.9ºC for the six months. It was also the station’s second-coldest winter (June, July and August) on record, with an average seasonal temperature of minus 62.9ºC. This was an extraordinary 3.4ºC below the long-term average (1881-2010) for winter.

Antarctic sea ice extent also was above average for several months.  In late August it was the fifth-highest in the 43-year satellite record. The maximum observed on September 1 was 18.75 million square kilometres (7.24 million square miles, over twice the size of Australia) and the second-earliest seasonal maximum in the satellite record. Ironically, it was “relatively cool” near the North Pole last summer, compared to recent years, which allowed September’s ice extent to be the highest since 2014.

On Thursday, September 30, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera tweeted:

Exceptional cold in the Antarctic Plateau. The Russian Base of Vostok on 30 September dropped to a min. temperature of -79.4C, which is only 0.6C above the world lowest temperature ever recorded in October (recorded at the former Plateau Station, also in Antarctica).

The jury is still out on precisely what caused the cold snap and its significance. According to NSIDC:

the unusual cold was attributed to two extended periods of stronger-than-average encircling winds around the continent, which tend to isolate the ice sheet from warmer conditions. A strong upper-atmosphere polar vortex was observed as well. (NSIDC, October 5, 2021)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

COVID Statistics by Dummies for Dummies Peter Smith

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/10/covid-statistics-by-dummies-for-dummies/

“More mundanely, two problems attend the use of statistics. One is sheer statistical ineptitude among medical researchers and the media. A second is confirmation bias among researchers aiming for plaudits and publications rather than the truth. A bias common to many fields of inquiry; including, of course, most notably, to climate change.”

Statistics should be kept out of bounds to non-statisticians; most particularly, right now, to medical researchers and epidemiologists. I say this because of the statistical garbage they’re cobbling together and feeding to the gullible press. Incidentally, this is no disrespect to the press. It’s just a matter of fact not condemnation.

To wit, a headline in The Telegraph (UK): “Vaccinated people dying of Covid have average age of 85 and five underlying illnesses.” It turns out that this result came out of the Italian Health Institute which had examined deaths from COVID between February 1 and October 5, 2021. And the point? To show that deaths among the unvaccinated occurred at a younger average age of 78; to boot, suffering only four underlying illnesses. It’s worth a laugh.

How many 85-year-old Italians with five serious underlying illnesses survived the first waves of the virus? I suggest that the population of such people would have been seriously and disproportionately depleted. It is therefore unsurprising that their marginally younger and fitter septuagenarian cousins are more recently taking the brunt. Was this allowed for? I doubt it. Also, it is more likely that those aged around 85 are in protected care than those aged around 78. Was this allowed for? I doubt it.

I have seen research on people in hospital which is then extended to the broader population. For example, an observation (from a CDC study) that the unvaccinated are disproportionately represented in hospital beds was spun by the press to suggest that those vaccinated are less likely to be infected and thus less likely to pass on the disease. But if the vaccines work to reduce the severity of the illness, then there may be many more people out there who are vaccinated passing on the disease than there are unvaccinated people. Who knows? What we do know is that the population in hospital is unlikely to be representative of people not in hospital. Wrong population upon which to base any general conclusion.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Virtue Signaling And Wokeness: A Return To The Primitive

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/26/virtue-signaling-and-wokeness-a-return-to-the-primitive/

Last week, activists at Dartmouth College reacted to notices of Republican-sponsored events by vandalizing property and harassing conservative students. Like so many other woke fits pitched by Democrats and their fellows travelers, the infantile behavior was driven not by policy differences but instead by primitive impulses, which have come to be regarded by the ruling class as acceptable responses.

According to Campus Reform, zealots tore up flyers announcing a speaking engagement and a panel discussion, and tried to intimidate members of the Dartmouth College Republicans. The topic of the talk was abortion, quite clearly a divisive issue in this country.

But it was not opposition to ideas that fed the thuggish behavior. It was fueled by a need for some to feel morally superior over others. It’s the same inclination that drives kids to pick on the least popular and the different among them on the playground. They feel better about their own inadequacies when they have a target to attack.

The ugly display at Dartmouth is an example of what we see frequently on college campuses. But bullying and threats are also widespread on social and mainstream media. We see it as well in Democratic politicians. They rely on their own “Big Lies” to spread misinformation, and actively try to pit American “deplorables” and bitter clingers against the cool kids.

This mob mentality intended to hurt has infected the left and radicalized a large segment of the country. Those living the out an “us vs. them” mindset have neither the inclination nor apparently the time – so busy in their efforts to ostracize that there’s not a moment for reasonable thought – to examine the facts they’re constantly screeching about.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden vs. Americans – his priorities, like climate change, ignore top worries of most voters Joe Biden has suffered the worst ratings slide of any president since World War II

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-polls-ignoring-voter-concerns-liz-peek

“When a majority (52%) of middle-income Americans and of Independents (51%) think Biden has abandoned them, Democrats should hit the panic button and radically rethink their agenda. Unhappily for Joe Biden, a reboot seems unlikely, as does a turnaround in his ratings anytime soon.”

Joe Biden has suffered the worst ratings slide of any president since World War II. That is probably not the kind of history Biden hoped to make when he secretly met with White House chroniclers in March and asked them how to be a “consequential” president like FDR.  

Why has the country turned against Uncle Joe? Simple: Biden is ignoring voters’ concerns. 

Voters are worried about inflation, jobs, crime, education and our open border, while the Biden White House is laser-focused on climate change, transgender rights, racism and reducing inequality. 

In a recent CBS/YouGov poll, only 37% of respondents said Biden and Democrats are focused on issues they “care a lot about.” That’s not good. 

Joe Biden is not walking down this misguided path alone; he is hauling nearly every agency of his government right along with him.  

For instance, the FBI, instead of focusing on the surging murder rate in our nation, has been ordered to hunt down “domestic terrorists” among the parents rightfully objecting to the racist curriculums being taught to their children.  

The State Department, having abandoned hundreds of Americans in Afghanistan and grievously misplaying every encounter to date with China, recently took time out to celebrate “International Pronouns Day,” issuing an explainer about “Pronoun Proficiency.”  

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Why Is America Financing the Chinese War Machine? by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on October 26th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17891/financing-china-war-machine

How did the Chinese come to possess such prowess? From us.

The Chinese… know that a democracy whose economy is weakened by COVID of a curious origin, a multi-trillion dollar budget that would plunge us into historic debt; a nation staggering under the burden of a possibly enfeebled national leadership, and a military humbled by being ordered off the Afghan battlefield by its commander-in-chief may be a once great country that has lost its way.

Washington needs to pivot and provide appropriate and necessary incentives for businesses to expand our once formidable manufacturing base here in the United States. America has the means, skills, and resources to return to its role as a super exporter, but to do so will also require us to get our economic house in order and freeze our nation’s debt ceiling. An economy that stands on the brink of a multi-trillion dollar self-induced debt makes us vulnerable to a fiscal collapse. Financial discipline will be required if we actually wish to stop our financing of the Chinese war machine.

Historians who have studied the decline and fall of great modern empires must be queasy these days.

Many have chronicled how a once mighty China lost its sovereignty to colonial powers during the early years of the 20th Century. Their enfeebled empress and a humbled military were swept aside by a European coalition of nations only to find that China was to become the bloody prize of Japanese generals whose forces raped and massacred their way to Beijing.