Like His Credibility, Fauci’s Book Has Disappeared By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/02/like-his-credibility-faucis-book-has-disappeared-n1451658

On Tuesday, we learned that Dr. Anthony Fauci was publishing a book called Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward.

According to the book description, “In his own words, world-renowned infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci shares the lessons that have shaped his life philosophy, offering an intimate view of one of the world’s greatest medical minds as well as universal advice to live by.”

But on Wednesday, the book had disappeared. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have deleted the book’s listings and pre-order options. The book’s removal comes in the wake of the release of emails obtained by a FOIA request revealing that Fauci knew that “the typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material,” despite his urging the public to wear them for safety, and that he had been informed that COVID-19 had “unusual features” that it “potentially look engineered” even though he publicly insisted that it was of natural origin.

It is not clear why the book has been removed from retailers or if there’s any connection whatsoever between the released emails and the decision to pull the book.

There are also unconfirmed reports that the White House is “actively discussing an exit strategy” for Dr. Fauci.

Yeah, Right: After Border Debacle, Biden Picks Kamala To Push ‘Voting Rights Reform’

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/06/03/yeah-right-after-border-debacle-biden-picks-kamala-to-push-voting-rights-reform/

You have to hand it to her: Vice President Kamala Harris has a knack for having her career advanced by others, despite continual abysmal performance as a public official. Unfair, you say? How else can you describe someone who fails so badly at one job, and then is immediately rewarded with another job of even greater importance?

There are lots of definitions out there for “failing upward” but probably the best comes from the “Simplicable” website, which calls it “a common feature of cronyism” in which members of a “social group continue to promote and reward each other despite an ongoing string of failures.”

Could anything better describe Harris’ political career, especially her latest turn as President Joe Biden’s “immigration czar”?

The most polite thing you can say about Harris’ so-far brief tenure as border czar is that she’s done little to make things worse. That’s largely because she’s a political cipher, picked precisely because she wouldn’t do a thing to stop illegal immigrants from crossing our borders.

That takes the heat off of Biden, whose early moves undid President Donald Trump’s smart, humane policy (which led to an enormous decline in both illegal contraband and border crossings), and replaced it with the Democrats’ dangerous, divisive open-border policy.

Harris is plainly incapable of doing the job. And that’s the point.

How else could you describe someone who claims that “climate adaptation” in Latin America is key to ending the U.S. border crisis?

Or someone who explained the “root causes” of the thousands of Central Americans illegally crossing the U.S. southern border by referencing the television show “Cheers,” where “everyone knows your name“?

Or someone who has focused on luring American companies to invest in Central America as a way to stop the surge, rather than focusing on the cause: Biden’s open-border policy?

Or someone who, during her 71 days as czar, refused to even visit the border or meet with border-state governors, who have desperately pleaded for help from Washington to handle Biden’s growing disaster?

Reparations Are Political Suicide, and Joe Biden Knows It By Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/reparations-are-political-suicide-and-joe-biden-knows-it/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

H.R. 40, the reparations bill, is DOA. Per Politico:

As a candidate, Biden said he supported a commission on reparations. But the administration has yet to endorse the actual bill. After his speech Tuesday, the president met with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who brought up the need for H.R. 40, which is named after the “40 acres and a mule” promise that now symbolizes the lack of support formerly enslaved people received from the federal government. According to those involved in the conversations, Biden let them down gently.

“He didn’t disagree with what we’re doing,” said Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.), the 2nd vice chair of the CBC. “He did talk about his plate [being] full with trying to get the infrastructure bill passed and that he really wanted to make sure that he could get that through before he took on anything else.”

Ouch.

H.R. 40, note, would not spend any money on reparations. It would simply create a commission to look into spending money on reparations. If Joe Biden is against even that at this early point in his presidency, then he’s going to be against the idea at every single point in his presidency. The next few months are going to be taken up with attempt to spend trillions of dollars on “infrastructure,” and, after that, the midterm election season will be upon us. In a cosmic sense, Biden may not “disagree with” what the CBC is doing. In practical terms, though, he’s running away from them as fast as he possibly can — and, in so doing, killing the idea dead for at least the rest of his tenure.

Joe Biden Attacks Courageous Maverick Democrats By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-attacks-courageous-maverick-democrats/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=second

President Joe Biden dinged both Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin during a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, yesterday, calling them “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” Some coverage alleged that Biden had merely insinuated that the duo voted against more than with him, but it’s a lie that would have generated cheeky chyron corrections on CNN and instantaneous across-the-board fact-checking — five Pinocchios and all the rest — had it been Donald Trump.

It’s not to say that Sinema and Manchin have signed on to all of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda items — often larded with proposals that Biden himself opposed only a couple of years ago, such as ending the Hyde amendment and allowing unlimited taxpayer funding of abortions. But, to this point, Sinema and Manchin have voted with the president 100 percent of the time. If Republicans are looking to them to be saviors, they will likely be disappointed.

Biden’s quip was meant to pressure both to help pass H.R. 1, and to give Democrats an excuse to blow up the Senate filibuster. The president, after all, framed their obstinance as a roadblock to protecting the “sacred right” of voting, again claiming that state laws that codify traditional integrity measures, rather than allowing the chaotic COVID–style free-for-all voting to become the norm, were on par with Jim Crow. H.R. 1 is an attack on free expression, an unconstitutional federal takeover of elections. Its scope is unprecedented. Yet, since the press has adopted the Democrats’ framing of the legislation — a “voting rights” bill meant to stop “Republican-led voting restrictions across the country” — many voters are probably confused by any reluctancy to support it.

Of course, the way Sinema and Manchin are portrayed by the press bears little resemblance to the coverage of, say, Susan Collins, who often held up Republican-agenda items. She was a plucky maverick ready to stand up for her beliefs. And Mitch McConnell was not, as far as I recall, asked daily whether he was willing to destroy the republican norms of the Senate to ram through his legislative agenda with a razor-thin majority. And even if he had been, reporters wouldn’t be referring to it as “filibuster reform.” Yet, the filibuster is the obsession of political media. Sinema and Manchin are the obsession of the political media. All of it geared to help one party realize its goals.

Never Let a Plague Go to Waste by Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/02/never-let-a-plague-go-to-waste/

During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.

They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.

Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing, or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.

Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.

After the 2008 financial meltdown, Barack Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the country. Now he’s back, weighing in on the panic-driven, multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion.

“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama said in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering—maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”

He apparently means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better approach to economics.

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about leveraging California’s statewide quarantine.

“There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism,” Newsom said. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”

Never Again: Standing Up to the Oligarchy Once again, American companies are doing business and making money with an oppressive foreign government running concentration camps. By Max Morton

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/19/never-again-standing-up-to-the-oligarchy/

Zivia Lubetkin was adamant—there would be no more talk. At 28, she was a leader of her youth group and a born fighter . . .  a Jewish girl, who less than three years earlier had smuggled herself back into German-occupied Warsaw from the Russian zone as Germany invaded Poland. She knew what was in store for her since the Nazis had been running concentration camps for Germany’s Jews since 1933, but she went anyway. Now it was July 1942, and the Nazis had just deported the first 56,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp—without resistance from the ghetto’s residents. 

Against the wishes of the Jewish leadership in Warsaw, who counseled obedience to Nazi authority out of concern for reprisals, Zivia and several members of her underground youth group decided it was time to form an armed resistance movement. There, in their makeshift safehouse at 34 Dzielna Street, with no money and only two stolen pistols, they started the first armed resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Fighting Organization Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB—“because it is better to be shot in the ghetto than to die in Treblinka!” 

Shortly thereafter they launched their first partisan action. For a young, ad hoc, and untrained partisan fighting group, it was a fairly complex three-pronged operation. They would conduct an information operation to disseminate posters declaring the truth that Treblinka was a death camp from which there would be no survivors, a sabotage operation to burn warehouses full of Nazi loot stolen from deported Jewish residents, and the assassination of the Jewish ghetto police chief. The operation was a success, although their assassination target did not die from his gunshot wounds.  

Zivia believed the ZOB had accomplished a great victory for the doomed residents of the Warsaw ghetto. She was shocked when she learned that the ghetto’s leaders were furious and that her posters were being torn down. ZOB members were attacked and beaten by many of the ghetto’s residents. 

DON FEDER: MAKING FUTURE ELECTIONS A SHAM

Speaking at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, Boobus Maximus warned that “Democracy itself is in peril here at home and around the world,” as Democrats move to establish one-party rule in the United States.

With the narrowest margin in the House in 100 years, and facing certain defeat in the 2022 election, Biden and his socialist party are moving rapidly to create a system where the semblance of democracy is maintained but Democrats are in power in perpetuity, through:

1. Packing the Supreme Court 

2. Blocking any effort at ballot integrity

3. DC and Puerto Rican Statehood – giving them a permanent majority in the Senate

4. Eliminating the Senate filibuster – and the need for the White House to negotiate anything

5. Abolishing the Electoral College – nationalizing presidential elections

6. Keeping the borders wide open – importing a new electorate.

These toxic “reforms” will make future elections a sham.

Like “The Perils of Pauline,” Democrats will have representative government tied to the railroad tracks, while Slow Joe drives the train over its prostrate body.

Protect the Grid — Urgently Needed and Affordable! By Henry F. Cooper

https://www.newsmax.com/henryfcooper/cme-covid-emp-gmd/2021/06/01/id/1023479/

Ambassador Henry F. (Hank) Cooper, Chairman of High Frontier and an acknowledged expert on strategic and space national security issues, was President Ronald Reagan’s Chief Negotiator at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

My recent Newsmax articles discussed natural and manmade existential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threats to the nation’s electric grid; and reported that in South Carolina we have demonstrated that protecting the grid is affordable.

Changes are required to assure our survival — and can be supported via the current infrastructure funding debate.

My March 16 article built on two previous articles emphasizing 1.) The “Cold Weather” Texas Grid Failure warning all Americans of the dangers of losing electricity for only 5-days (several times officially acknowledged 151 fatalities); and 2.) That President Biden’s proposed “American Rescue Plan” should protect all Americans against a major electric grid failure — from a major “solar storm” that for sure will one day occur.

My May 27 article discussed reports that major solar storms are likely in the next few years. A coronial mass ejection (CME) passing through the Earth’s orbit may envelop it and interact with its geomagnetic field to produce a major Geomagnetic Disturbance (GMD) not seen since the 1859 Carrington Event that today would crash electric grids leaving Americans without life support for months.

Most would die within a year due to the consequent disease, starvation and societal collapse — according to the Congressional EMP Commission.

Lower-level CME/GMDs could also seriously damage our unprotected grid.

My March 16 article referred to a March 6, 2021 Wall Street Journal report that proposed legislation then included $350-billion for state and local authorities, with $10-billion designated for infrastructure — an opportunity. Various reports indicated follow-on legislation would include additional infrastructure funding.

My April 23 discussion noted a proposal by Rep. Yvette Clark, D-N.Y., — chair of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee — that an Infrastructure Bill include funds for local and state authorities to protect the grid against cyberattack.

As cochair of the Congressional EMP Caucus, she knows that the military doctrine of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran includes EMP as the most consequential cyberattack strategy — a connection that infrastructure negotiations should address.

Hopes grew as the Biden administration proposed even more spending and seemed open to improving traditional infrastructure. I hoped to see the grid (as traditional infrastructure) protected against the existential EMP threat.

But ongoing negotiations among the “powers that be” offer little encouragement.

Senator Shelly Moore Capito, R-W. Va., who is leading Republication negotiators —including with President Biden (meeting scheduled tomorrow) has insisted on “real” or “physical” infrastructure — including new “broadband” that depends on electricity.

Is Bibi Out? It’s far from clear. But what IS clear is that these three headlines completely miss what’s interesting about today’s breaking news … Daniel Gordis

https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/is-bibi-out-its-far-from-clear?token=

Yesterday, Israel got a new President (Isaac Herzog — more on whom in a later posting), and, more significantly, may have taken a step towards getting a new Prime Minister. We shall see. While Yair Lapid (on the right, above), who leads the centrist Yesh Atid [“There is a Future”] Party, has informed the (current) President that he can form a coalition, the actual vote on this coalition will probably not take place for twelve days. Bibi will use this time to do everything he can to undermine the fragile agreement. Netanyahu contends that as long as he is Prime Minister, he cannot be convicted in his corruption trial and sent to jail; if he’s out of office, he has no such protection. We should thus expect to see some very scorched earth as he desperately (and perhaps successfully) tries to cling to power.

While the question of who will be Israel’s “next” Prime Minister remains unresolved, what is clear is that some international coverage of what is unfolding here is so myopic as to be essentially wrong. According to the “all the news that’s fit to print” world (see screen shot below), Israel is lurching to the right under the leadership of a new “ultranationalist” leader. The real story is precisely the opposite.

So with a few quick bullet points, a brief illustration of how much more complex — and hopeful — the story really is.

America the Outlier: Voter Photo IDs Are the Rule in Europe and Elsewhere By John R. Lott Jr.,

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/06/01/the_us_is_a_voter_photo_id_outlier_theyre_the_rule_in_europe_and_elsewhere_778714.html

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned. 

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they’ve experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Britain is Europe’s outlier in generally not requiring voter IDs, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson aims to change that. He went to the polls in May with wife-to-be Carrie Symonds.
AP Photo/Matt Dunham

Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe — a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy — all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation to have the rest of the country follow suit. 

Criticisms of the British leader’s voter ID push are similar to those heard in the U.S. The Scottish National Party claims his voter ID push targets “lower income, ethnic minority and younger people” who are less likely to vote for Johnson’s conservatives and therefore represents “Trump-like voter suppression.” 

Yet despite such pushback, Britain looks set to follow countries in Europe and elsewhere with stricter voting regimes, few of which temporarily relaxed any of their voting rules during the pandemic.

Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who reside domestically. Another 6% limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15% require a photo ID for absentee voting.

Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33 nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (which has considerable European overlap). Only the UK, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia currently do not require IDs.