Media companies bill is bait and switch to strangle conservative outlets By Ken Blackwell

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/media_companies_bill_is_bait_and_switch_to_strangle_conservative_outlets.html

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JPCA) is a bait-and-switch attempt that claims to help conservative news sources but would instead purge them from the marketplace of ideas.  Congress should reject it for the freedom-killer it is.

JCPA would give media companies — broadcast and print — an exemption from federal antitrust laws, so they can operate in a coordinated fashion to negotiate prices that social media companies like Facebook would have to pay them to carry their content.  It would ensure that these tech billionaires would have to direct some of their riches into content providers.

But that’s a Big Boys’ game, where the major players could decide whom to let into their club.  Smaller outlets would be left out in the cold, and the market would suffer.

This is because almost all of the Big Boys are liberal.  For print, there are the New York Times and the Washington Post.  For video content providers, you have the networks, CNN, and MSNBC.  The twin star performers owned by News Corp — Fox News Channel and the Wall Street Journal — are some of the only ones to the right of the 50-yard line.

North Korea Fires First Missiles During Biden Presidency U.S. says Kim regime launched short-range missiles, protesting joint American-South Korean military exercises

https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-koreas-military-carries-out-unusual-activities-near-border-11616508652?mod=world_major_1_pos1

North Korea launched several short-range missiles over the weekend, U.S. and South Korean officials said, in a show of defiance against President Biden and his administration that was widely expected after joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises.

The weekend launches caused no damage and are being viewed more as a symbolic show of strength than one intended to inflict damage or hit any specific targets, according to two U.S. officials.

U.S. officials declined to provide details about the short-range missile launches or even how many were launched. The launches aren’t covered by the United Nations Security Council resolutions that govern such activity, and they were on the “low end” of routine activity from the North Koreans, two senior administration officials said.

President Biden said he didn’t consider the launch a provocation.

“According to the Defense Department, it’s business as usual,” he said at the White House. “There is no new wrinkle in what they did.”

A senior U.S. official said Pyongyang “has a clear menu of provocations when it wants to send a message,” and “what took place last weekend is falling on the low end of that spectrum.”

On Wednesday, Seoul’s military said North Korea had fired two projectiles that appeared to be cruise missiles. The Sunday-morning launches occurred about 30 miles west of Pyongyang, the military said.

South Korean defense officials said the previous day that they were monitoring unusual activity by North Korea’s military in a sector close to the South Korean border. It wasn’t the same area where the suspected missile launches took place.

North Korea frequently fired off short-range missiles even as negotiations between leader Kim Jong Un and then-President Donald Trump’s administration inched on. At the time, Mr. Trump and his administration maintained that the short-range missiles didn’t violate the terms laid out in his discussions with Pyongyang, which failed to yield an accord. CBS News earlier reported the missile launches.

The Biden administration is nearing the end of a review of its policy with North Korea, the senior administration officials said. Next week, national-security adviser Jake Sullivan is expected to meet in person in Washington with counterparts from South Korea and Japan to discuss the U.S. posture with regard to North Korea, the officials said. It follows visits by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who traveled to Tokyo and Seoul last week.

Before the Shooting Who is Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa? By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/before-the-shooting-11616538752?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

There’s a contemporary political compulsion to immediately inject a horrific shooting into ongoing debates about types of weapons and the terms for acquiring them. But before legislating a response, lawmakers should spend some time trying to figure out why Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa allegedly murdered 10 people on Monday at a Boulder, Colo. supermarket.

CNN’s Ray Sanchez, Blake Ellis and Amir Vera report:

Alissa, whose family emigrated from Syria, may have been suffering from mental illness, according to his 34-year-old brother, Ali Aliwi Alissa.
The brother told CNN on Tuesday that in high school bullies made fun of Alissa’s name and for being Muslim and that may have contributed to him becoming “anti-social.”
Alissa had become increasingly “paranoid” around 2014, believing he was being followed and chased, according to his brother. At one point, the young man covered the camera on his computer with duct tape so he could not be seen, said the brother, who lives with Alissa…
“We kept a close eye on him when he was in high school. He would say, ‘Someone is chasing me, someone is investigating me.’ And we’re like, ‘Come on man. There’s nothing.’ … He was just closing into himself,” the brother added.

Democrats Give Their Iowa Game Away Their lawyer says the House should ignore state law to steal a House seat.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-give-their-iowa-game-away-11616538412?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

“Democrats are using every legal trick in an effort to claw back a House seat. But in the process they may finally awaken Republicans from their political slumber to see what is happening in Iowa. This is a power grab, pure and simple, and Republicans should be shouting about it to everyone in Iowa and beyond.”

Now here’s some lawyering that may turn out to be too clever by half.

Democratic litigator Marc Elias on Monday submitted his latest brief on behalf of defeated congressional candidate Rita Hart. He wants the House of Representatives to overturn the election in Iowa’s 2nd district, which Ms. Hart lost by six votes to GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. But rather than asserting that if state election law is strictly followed his client would win, Mr. Elias tells House Democrats that they may need to bend the law to reach their desired outcome.

His brief responds to questions from the Committee on House Administration. In the first response, on procedures the committee should use in adjudicating the election challenge, Mr. Elias says “the Committee ‘is certainly not bound to’ follow state law.” The quote is from a 1985 case when the House overturned an Indiana election to seat the Democrat.

That sentence wasn’t a slip. Mr. Elias adds that “when voter intent can be determined but a ballot is not, for one reason or another, in strict conformity with state law,” it should be counted. He urges the Committee to “exercise its discretion to depart from Iowa law, and adopt counting rules that ‘disenfranchise the smallest possible number of voters.’”

Africa Why Nigerian Schoolchildren Keep Getting Kidnapped: A Brutal Business Model That Pays Criminal gangs are earning millions of dollars by taking schoolchildren hostage, sometimes cooperating with Boko Haram, further destabilizing countries in the region By Joe Parkinson and Gbenga Akingbule

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kidnapping-schoolchildren-in-nigeria-becomes-big-business-11616511947?mod=hp_lead_pos5

KADUNA, Nigeria—The kidnap for ransom business is booming across northern Nigeria, and schoolchildren are its hottest commodity.

Just before midnight on March 11 gunmen barged into a school around 300 yards from a military training college in Kaduna state and seized dozens of students from their dormitories. It took less than 12 hours for the captors to issue a now familiar demand, through a grainy video posted on Facebook.

“They want 500 million Naira,” said one of the terrified hostages from the Federal College of Forestry, sitting shirtless in a forest clearing, a sum equal to around $1 million. Masked men wielding Kalashnikovs paced among the 39 students—mostly young women—then began to hit them with bullwhips.

“Our life is in danger,” a woman screamed. “Just give them what they want.”

On March 13, the Nigerian army foiled an attempt to kidnap 300 more students at a boarding school less than 50 miles away. The following day, children were among a group of 11 people abducted from the town of Suleja, in Nigeria’s Niger state.

This was just one weekend in what has become a routine and brutal business in Africa’s most populous country. Since December, heavily armed criminal gangs have abducted and ransomed more than 800 schoolchildren, rocking Nigeria and drawing calls for urgent action from the U.S. government, the European Union and Pope Francis. Hundreds of school campuses have been closed across four states for fear of more attacks, leaving close to 15 million Nigerian children out of school—more than any other country in the world.

Garland-Wray Axis Exploits January 6 to Criminalize Dissent “We are facing a far more dangerous period than we did in Oklahoma City.” Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/far-more-dangerous-period-lloyd-billingsley/

“Under Joe Biden, by contrast, the FBI mounts massive raids against people not charged with any violent crime. The president’s lawyer Merrick Garland gives full support. This partisan sophist vows to protect the DOJ, not the constitutional rights of the people. If anybody thought Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray are out to criminalize dissent it would be hard to blame them. As Garland says, we are facing a more dangerous period now.”

“I certainly agree that we are facing a more dangerous period than we did in Oklahoma City at that time,” said Biden Attorney General pick Merrick Garland in his Senate confirmation hearing. The reference was to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people.

Garland supervised the prosecution of the bomber, Timothy McVeigh. On the other hand, according to remarks Garland made before confirmation as U.S. Attorney General, that deadly bombing would not even qualify as an act of terrorism.

According to Garland, nationwide BLM-Antifa violence does not qualify as terrorism because it took place at night. So if Timothy McVeigh had detonated his bomb at midnight, he too would have escaped the domestic terrorist tag. So much for the great legal mind all attorneys general are supposed to display.

For Garland, job one will be prosecution of those involved in the “heinous attack” of January 6, in which no bombs were detonated and the only people with guns were the police. One cop gunned down Air Force veteran and Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt, but Garland appears unconcerned about that police shooting.

Boulder Shooter is ISIS Sympathizer, Leftists Hardest Hit Another opportunity to shore up their sagging “white terror threat” narrative is lost. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/boulder-shooter-isis-sympathizer-leftists-hardest-robert-spencer/

A man murdered ten people in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket Monday. No details were immediately released about the shooter, but Leftist “journalists,” working from a photo of the shooter, seized upon the shooting to shore up their sagging narrative of “white supremacist terrorism.” There was just one problem: the massacre was actually, after a four-year hiatus, a new incidence of Islamic jihad on American soil.

Even after the shooter’s name was revealed as Ahmad Al Issa (which is how he himself wrote it on his Facebook and Twitter accounts), establishment media reports continued to give his name as  “Alissa,” which of course is a common first name for women in the U.S., and thus gives the impression that he is an American non-Muslim. Were “journalists” trying to obscure the fact that he is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer? Of course they were.

And that was after they had already decided that he was one of those “right-wing extremists” who are, according to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the “most lethal and persistent” threat the U.S. faces today. Julie DiCaro, a senior writer and editor at Deadspin, tweeted: “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” As of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, DiCaro has not taken down the tweet, as some media hacks are still, like a captain going down with his sinking ship, insisting that Al Issa is white. Prominent race baiter Tariq Nasheed tweeted: “White supremacists are trying their hardest to deflect from the fact the Boulder suspect is WHITE. Syrians in America are legally, politically & socially WHITE. Their white status is well documented in court cases Terms like ‘muslim’, ‘Arab’, ‘islamic’ doesn’t change whiteness.”

Of course Al Issa really is white, as he is an Arab Muslim migrant from Syria, and Arabs have been considered “white” ever since they began arriving in this country. Nasheed’s tweet, however, still pointed up the Left’s inconsistency and hypocrisy: up until this shooting, Leftists considered Arab Muslims to be “brown,” after the fashion of Linda Sarsour, who memorably identified as white until she put on a hijab and miraculously became a “person of color.” If the Boulder shooter had been a white non-Muslim American and his victims had been white Arab Muslims, Tariq Nasheed would be railing against the persecution of “brown” people in the United States.

The Climate Headline The Legacy Media Wouldn’t Dare Write

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/24/the-climate-headline-the-legacy-media-wouldnt-dare-write/

Barack Obama’s undersecretary of energy for science has shattered the popular global warming narrative. If he had worked in the Trump administration, he’d be labeled a “denier” and hounded like a suspected witch in 17th century Massachusetts. But because he was an Obama appointee, the press simply ignores him. 

Steve Koonin, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology- and CalTech-educated physicist, said last week that “discussions of existential threat, climate crisis, climate disaster are really at odds with what the official science says in reports that are issued by the U.N. and the U.S. government.” Shouldn’t the press have picked up on this?

Koonin, in an interview on Fox Business with Larry Kudlow, busted the tale that humans are wrecking the planet and endangering themselves through their fossil-fuel burning habits.

“This is not Steve talking, this is what’s in those reports, often explicitly but sometimes a little but obscured, and you’ve got to read closely to find it.”

Koonin said there has been a single degree of warming over the last century, caused partly by man, partly by nature. He sees nothing menacing about it. He also admitted that science has a “very poor understanding” of natural long-term climate cycles, something the global warming alarmists are unwilling to acknowledge.

The Q Lie: The Power-Grab After January 6th Was the Real Insurrection. Thomas J. Farnan

https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/the-q-lie-the-power-grab-response-after-january-6th-was-the-real-insurrection/

“The Q Lie is an excuse for politicians to grab power from the people. It is, to borrow an expression, a form of insurrection.”

Despite parts of the fencing being removed this weekend, the nation’s capital is still protected by armed troops and razor wire because government officials claim to fear invasion by Trump-supporting QAnon followers.

Seriously.

The concern is they will drive to D.C., get hotel rooms, grab their free breakfast, then strike at dawn with fire extinguishers or anything that counts under the present hysteria as an armament; i.e., shoes, purses or bear spray.

The attack was expected on March 4 but never materialized. Federal law enforcement recalibrated, shifting the anticipated coup de main to March 20. That never happened either.

Notably, the federal government failed to similarly protect the capital in 1814, when the Brits burned down the White House, and in 1861, when the Army of Northern Virginia encamped at what is now a shopping mall in Manassas, Virginia.

C’mon, man!

Immediately after the events of January 6, The National Pulse called out The Insurrection Lie, specifically questioning the political narrative then being fabricated around Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick’s unfortunate death.

Our reporting would eventually push the New York Times to back down from its fake news claim that Office Sicknick was bludgeoned to death by Trump supporters using a fire extinguisher.

It is now obvious that the continued military occupation of Washington D.C. under a phony, Q-pretext is a purposeful overreaction to silence objections over the use of mass mail-in ballots to swing the 2020 election.

In support of our election skepticism, we cite Time Magazine’s comprehensive report, The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.

THE ELECT: THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS Serial excerpt No. 5: Why it won’t do to admit this is a religion and “own” it – The Elect harbor a religion that harms black people in countless ways.John McWhorter

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-the-threat-to-a-progressive-598

“To be Elect is to insist that unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity, which is false.”

One response to a book like this might be to own that Electism is a religion. You might consider it a better one than, say, believing that God’s son died for our sins and was reborn, waiting to envelope you in his eternal grace if you believe in him. This new religion is about countering racism. Who could be against that?

But we must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than making educated white people infantilize them. While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures. It is a terrifyingly damaging business.

ELECT IDEOLOGY HURTS BLACK PEOPLE

The Bigotry Against Black Boys

Black boys get suspended and expelled from schools more than other kids. According to Elect ideology this must be because they are discriminated against.

Specifically, we are told to think that the reason these boys get disciplined more than other kids is because teachers hold biases against them. The white kid acting up is a scamp; the black kid acting up is a thug. There are scholar-activists who have founded whole careers on bringing this wisdom to America’s educators and beyond. In 2014, a “Dear Colleague” letter went out from the U.S. Department of Education concurring that black boys are disciplined disproportionately because of racism. In 2019, the United States Commission on Civil Rights released a briefing report making the same case titled “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities.”

Noble notions from noble entities. But the simple fact is this. Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids. Period.