Ben Shapiro: Biden Sets Everything on Fire If the conflagration we’ve seen thus far is any indicator, Biden won’t leave a lot standing when he’s done.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/79815-biden-sets-everything-on-fire-2021-05-12?mailing_id=5833&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5833&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body

Joe Biden is the luckiest man to ever assume the presidency.

He succeeded an unpopular figure. He was inaugurated just two weeks after the dramatic storming of the U.S. Capitol by extremist Donald Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification of the 2020 election, which was also the beginning of the year after widespread race riots. He inherited COVID-19 vaccines and a vaccine rollout plan, and could rightly expect to ride the tsunami of natural economic recovery that was predicted for the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic; he inherited a series of historic Middle Eastern peace deals.

In other words, President Biden had it easy. All he had to do was nothing. He could expect a new era of good feelings emerging from a tumultuous time. He could expect a booming economy, a more peaceful Middle East, a solution to the pandemic. All he had to do was calm the waters.

This, after all, was what Americans voted for: not a transformational figure or a figure of radical change but a stodgy, supposedly empathetic grandfather figure who could barely be bothered to leave his basement for the entirety of the presidential campaign. Normalcy could be restored by installing a nearly inanimate object as president.

Instead, Biden has served as a facade for the most radical administration in modern American history. And America is already paying the price.

In his first few months in office, Biden rammed through a $1.9 trillion spending package that completely rewrote the bargain between individuals and the state, shifting the incentive structure for people to go back to work. He simultaneously proposed another $4 trillion in spending — to go along with the annual $4 trillion budget. The result: skyrocketing inflation in commodities, along with dramatic labor shortages resulting in an April shortfall of three-quarters of a million new jobs.

Let’s demand a recount…of COVID deaths. By Thomas T. Siler, M.D.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/lets_demand_a_recountof_covid_deaths.html

How deadly is the SARS-COV-2 virus? Part of the equation depends on accurately determining just who has died from COVID-19 infection. It turns out that, thanks to changes the Centers for Disease Control (“CDC”) made to its rules, along with Congressional incentives, America’s COVID-19 counts are almost certainly inaccurate.

America counts COVID-19 deaths differently from other countries. According to Dr. Deborah Birx, speaking at the start of the pandemic, “if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”

However, we must acknowledge that there is a difference between dying from COVID-19 and dying with COVID-19. This is a familiar uncertainty for doctors during the winter flu season.

In most states, 40-60% of the people dying of SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are elderly persons with multiple medical problems who live in nursing homes. A portion of this same cohort dies every year from the seasonal influenza virus. When that happens, did the flu kill them or their cancer, heart failure, strokes, or liver problems? Doctors use their best judgment to fill out the death certificate correctly, but they do not categorize all of them as “flu” deaths.

According to the CDC, only 6% of those who died with the COVID-19 infection had no other pre-existing health conditions. The other 94% had an average of four medical conditions already affecting their health.

This does not mean that only 6% of these deaths resulted from COVID-19. But it also does not mean that 100% of the deaths among people with other medical conditions should be counted as death from COVID-19 either. If we counted each death that tested positive for flu or had symptoms of flu as an “influenza death,” we would also have hundreds of thousands of flu deaths each year.

When it comes to the flu, though, we don’t tally either the 6% or the 100%. The real answer is in the middle. Applying that same logic to COVID-19 means that conservatively 25-50% of the deaths labeled from COVID-19 more likely died with COVID-19.

The Left’s War on Procreation “Vogue” calls childbearing “environmental vandalism.” Gates and Biden agree. Don Feder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/lefts-war-procreation-don-feder/

Last week, the left’s war on procreation was headline news.

In the April 29th British edition of Vogue, Nell Frizzell wrote a pean to population control: “Is Having a Child Pure Environmental Terrorism?” – a shameless piece of virtue signaling.

Frizzell confessed that when she was pregnant, she “worried feverishly about the strain on the Earth’s resources that another Western child would add.”

The author went on to agonize about the amount of electricity her child would use in his lifetime, the food he would consume and what it would take to grow it – and how the future consumer would add to air pollution, global warming and depleted resources.

It was painful to read and depressing to contemplate – that someone so indoctrinated in the cult of Carbon Footprints can display their ignorance in the mass media.

Then there was the news that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, America’s Woke power couple, are getting a divorce. Unfortunately, the work of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will continue. With $43.3 billion in assets (larger than the economies of most countries) the Foundation is dedicated to making the world a more barren place.

Its target isn’t Western children but kids in Africa, which, in a way, makes sense. Africa is the only continent with above-replacement fertility.  In conjunction with the United Nations Population Fund, the Gates Foundation sponsored a series of international conferences pushing population control, including abortion.

At one in Addis Ababa in 2013, there was, according to UNFPA, “a focus on universal access to reproductive health (code for abortion and government-sponsored contraception), especially for young people and other vulnerable groups.”

Bill’s interest in young people was reflected in his friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, already convicted of soliciting sex from minors when the two first met in 2011.

Calling on ‘Moderate’ Democrats When blaming Trump no longer does the job. David Limbaugh

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/calling-moderate-democrats-david-limbaugh/

Everyone knows President Joe Biden ran as a moderate and is governing as a leftist radical, yet we see little evidence of Democrats, including the liberal media, breaking ranks from him. Why?

I’ve previously written about the lack of Democrats’ dissent from their party’s undeniable extremism and have always been met with the response that they don’t dissent because there are no longer any moderate Democrats. Yet when I talk to my Democratic friends, they vehemently deny that they personally are extremists. Are they, or might they just as well be?

Rank-and-file Democrats can no longer blame their rank partisanship and extremism on Donald Trump, who is no longer president. It’s past time for them — and never-Trump Republicans, for that matter — to answer for Biden’s disastrous policies.

Let’s look at Biden’s border debacle as one of many flagrant examples of raging Democratic and media hypocrisy, for they’re giving Biden a complete pass and even defending him on the very policies for which they berated Trump.

Biden wholly owns this border train wreck, though he disingenuously continues to blame Trump. Trump’s border policies were working. We had seen major progress in sealing the border; fewer migrants were entering the United States, and cartels were being stymied. But Democrats, wedded to their open-borders agenda and their faux compassion for illegal immigrants, castigated Trump as a racist and particularly zeroed in on his allegedly inhumane treatment of children. Now the cartels are flourishing, and our borders are being overrun. And we know all the hyperventilating over the children had nothing to do with any genuine concern for them but with demonizing and defeating Trump — and cynically promoting Democrats’ policies to flood the borders with future Democratic voters.

We know this because the Biden administration is doing nothing to address this growing and dangerously out-of-control border situation. This crisis is a direct result of Biden’s virtual invitation to migrants to come on up, his promises of amnesty and welfare for illegals, and his emasculation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Purely for appearances’ sake, as we now know, Biden put Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of this crisis, and she has done nothing except cackle when asked about her progress.

Hamas Tests Israel—and Biden Iran’s Palestinian ally reignites its conflict with the Jewish state.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamas-tests-israeland-biden-11620772433?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The jihadists of Hamas on Tuesday launched the biggest single-day rocket attack on the Jewish State in memory, with hundreds flying toward Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as well as the usual civilian targets in southern Israel. Israel struck back at 500 targets in Gaza, and this has the potential to become a larger conflict after a relatively long period of Mideast quiet.

The Hamas attacks come after days of Palestinian riots in Jerusalem, some prompted by long-running property disputes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Israeli courts ruled in favor of Jewish owners and against Palestinian leaseholders who claim rights to the property dating to Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The case’s Supreme Court hearing was delayed.

Mahmoud Abbas, who runs the Palestinian West Bank region adjacent to Jerusalem, has been held up as a moderate negotiating partner for Israel. Yet his party fomented the Jerusalem violence, broadcasting that it “calls on everyone to raise the level of confrontation in the coming days and hours in the Palestinian lands,” according to Palestinian Media Watch.

The 85-year-old Mr. Abbas, who has headed the Palestinian Authority since 2005 without standing for re-election, may want to turn up the temperature to compensate for falling public confidence in his rule. He’s in competition with Hamas and even more extreme groups, which he shut out of power in the West Bank last month by postponing elections yet again. Hamas, which promises the destruction of Israel, one-upped Mr. Abbas’s riots by reigniting its military confrontation.

The Dark Face of Palestinian Terror A death cult reignites its terror against Israeli civilians. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/dark-face-palestinian-terror-joseph-klein/

The “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is spinning out of control toward another possible all-out war. Blame should, of course, fall on the Palestinian terrorists operating from Gaza, who have once again fired hundreds of rockets inside Israel against civilian targets. This time, the terrorists deliberately escalated what began as a local fracas over the possible eviction of Palestinians from homes they have been occupying in an area of East Jerusalem known as Sheikh Jarrah. Israeli Jews claim that this land belongs to them. After a barrage of rocket attacks, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck back. The Palestinians are complaining. Here we go again.

The pattern is very familiar by now. Palestinians use a pretext to start a riot. The Israeli police and security forces respond proportionately. The Palestinians up the ante, prompting a further Israeli response. Then Palestinian terrorists in Gaza use the territory they control to launch rocket attacks into Israel against civilian targets. Israel warns the terrorists to stop the rocket fire, which the terrorists ignore. After the Israeli military retaliates proportionately in an effort to target the terrorists responsible for the rocket attacks and their facilities, Palestinian government leaders cry foul. They point to unintended Palestinian civilian casualties, which are often caused by the Palestinian terrorists putting the civilians, including women and children, in harm’s way. Then, with their usual crocodile tears, Palestinian diplomats run to the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other globalist forums to reprise their false narrative of victimhood at the hands of the “oppressor,” “murderous,” “apartheid” Israeli regime. The Palestinians can count on leftist support for their cause in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

In short, Palestinian militants provoke violence to which Israel responds. Palestinian terrorists target innocent civilians deliberately. Israel targets the terrorists and their facilities, with policies and practices in place to minimize civilian casualties. And like the youth who kills his parents and then asks the judge for mercy because he’s an orphan, the Palestinians ask the so-called “international community” to rally around them.

The Israeli Supreme Court had not even ruled yet on the Sheikh Jarrah dispute before Palestinian agitators exploited the situation. They used the dispute, together with a peaceful Jerusalem Day parade celebrating Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as an excuse to riot. Israeli police responded, leading to an outbreak of violence in and around the Temple Mount.

Then Hamas and Islamic Jihad entered the fray by firing hundreds of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel and several rockets into the Jerusalem area. Abu Ubaida, a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, said it had launched “a rocket strike against the enemy in the occupied Jerusalem in response to their crimes and aggression against the holy city and its aggression against our people in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa mosque.” This was the first time since the 2014 Gaza War that Hamas has aimed its rockets at Jerusalem.

While Israel’s Iron Dome defense system managed to intercept some of the rockets, others got through and killed at least two Israeli civilians, injured scores of other Israelis, and destroyed homes.

On Tuesday evening, as reported by the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists launched rockets reaching the Tel Aviv region. One of the rockets hit a bus, causing several injuries, including to a 5-year-old girl.  

Why Is Twitter Letting Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei Incite Rocket Attacks on Israeli Civilians? By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-is-twitter-letting-irans-ayatollah-khamenei-incite-rocket-attacks-on-israeli-civilians/?utm_source=

As the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians intensified on Tuesday night, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who helps fund and direct Hamas’s actions, tweeted out the following:

Khamenei.ir

·Palestinians are awake and determined. They must continue this path. One can only talk with the language of power with these criminals. They must increase their strength, stand strong, confront the enemy, and force them to stop their crimes. #FreePalestine

Within minutes, the IDF reported sirens were sounding in Tel Aviv as one of its largest cities came under a barrage of rocket fire.

It’s worth remembering that when Donald Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter while still an office holder, Twitter cited, “the risk of further incitement of violence.”

Yet in this case Ayatollah is using Twitter to directly signal to his terrorist proxy group Hamas that they should continue attacking civilians. Why does that not count as inciting violence?

To be clear, this is not a one off tweet by Ayatollah. He has continually used the account to urge Palestinian terrorists to continue attacks on Israel. Here is a sampling of tweets over just the past few days.

Yes, the Abraham Accords Were a Historic Success By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yes-the-abraham-accords-were-a-historic-success/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second

David Frum
@davidfrum
Remember all the Trump-Kushner self-congratulation about their Middle East successes?

The Abraham Accords were predicated on the idea that the United States could broker peace between Israel and once-antagonistic Arab nations by bypassing the intractable Palestinians, who have actively stood in the way of every agreement since 1994. Though they are mentioned in passing, the agreement has nothing to do with Palestinians, who grumbled at the time, “Our Arab brothers have abandoned us.”

Jared Kushner, whose approach had more results than anything tried by the Obama administration retreads who now populate the Biden administration, never claimed the normalization deals would fix the Palestinian situation.

Here is what he said at the time:

You have 5 million Palestinians who are really trapped because of bad leadership. So what we’ve done is we’ve created an opportunity for their leadership to either seize or not. If they screw up this opportunity — which again, they have a perfect track record of missing opportunities — if they screw this up, I think they will have a very hard time looking the international community in the face, saying they are victims, saying they have rights. This is a great deal for them. If they come to the table and negotiate, I think they can get something excellent …

The Palestinian leadership have to ask themselves a question: Do they want to have a state? Do they want to have a better life? If they do, we have created a framework for them to have it, and we’re going to treat them in a very respectful manner. If they don’t, then they’re going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.

Indeed, the Palestinians have extended their perfect track record of “missing opportunities” (really, more like blowing them up). And the fact that Iranian-funded Hamas rockets are falling on Jewish cities or that riots are being perpetuated by the Palestinian Authority only further proves that Kushner was right: Waiting around for the theocrats in Gaza or corrupt former PLO officials in West Bank is a foolish endeavor. Now, maybe Frum and others believe that those who indiscriminately fire Qassam rockets at civilians deserve their own state. But that has nothing to do with the Abraham Accords.

New York-Style Justice Disarms the Victims There is nothing accidental in today’s New York. It is exactly what the Left wanted—only not yet violent enough, not yet dangerous enough. By Dan Gelernter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/11/new-york-style-justice-disarms-the-victims/

In Times Square on Saturday, a street vendor named Farrakhan Muhammad got in an argument with his brother and tried to shoot him. With the surgical precision for which petty criminals are known, the man instead wounded three bystanders, including a four-year-old girl. One of the victims said she is unlikely to visit New York again until the city has stricter gun laws.

But New York City already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. Muhammad was carrying an illegal gun illegally—that is, the gun was illegally owned and illegally carried. If he had obtained the gun legally, Muhammad would have been required to attend a government-approved safety class in which he would have learned that you may not discharge a weapon indiscriminately in Times Square while attempting to murder your brother (this is covered on the first day).

If the gun had been legal, it would also have meant Muhammad had paid hundreds of dollars in permitting fees, had obtained letters of recommendation from friends attesting to his good character, had been fingerprinted by the police, had waited several months to obtain the permit to purchase this particular pistol (on which he would have had to put down an advance deposit, its serial number having been submitted to the state), and he would then have had to wait a year after obtaining the permit to apply for a further permit to carry the weapon, for which he would have had to demonstrate to the satisfaction of New York a valid reason for needing to do so. 

I very much doubt that Muhammad did any of this. 

And when someone is already breaking four or five different laws, it’s hard to imagine a sixth law on the same subject being the deciding factor.

It’s also hard to imagine how gun laws could become stricter in New York. In fact, any weapon that might be remotely useful for self-defense is prohibited. That includes pepper spray, tasers, blackjacks, batons, nunchucks, coshes of any sort, including a coin purse that has a handle, slingshots, and sandbags. Don’t get caught trying to defend yourself in the city with an illicit sandbag: That’s criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree. 

Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be A Jimmy Carter Reboot

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/12/joe-biden-is-turning-out-to-be-a-jimmy-carter-reboot/

Joe Biden was the first senator to endorse Jimmy Carter for president.  Now Biden appears bent on recreating Carter’s disastrous presidency. The parallels are striking.

What characterized Carter’s one-term presidency? Disasters at home and abroad. At home, the country suffered a self-inflicted energy crisis, with gas shortages and long lines. Inflation surged even as unemployment climbed, making the “Misery Index” a household term. Abroad, America’s adversaries sensed Carter’s weakness as Commander in Chief and the world was thrown in chaos – from the Iranian Revolution to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Carter’s response to these disasters was to tell people to turn down their thermostats. He blamed Americans for what he called a “crisis of confidence.”

What’s happened after just over three months with Biden in the White House?

Both the unemployment rate and the inflation rate have been on the rise and the world is getting more dangerous.

This week, the stock market suffered two days of heavy losses as inflation fears mounted.

Forbes quoted Sophie Griffiths, a market analyst at Oanda, as saying that “The overriding fear is that pandemic stimulus combined with reopening economies will spark a sharp drive high in inflation, forcing central banks to take action, tightening policy and potentially slowing down the economic recovery.”