Ohio sets November special election, leaving Pelosi with empty seat most of the year Democrats’ progressive-establishment split could affect race

https://www.rollcall.com/2021/03/18/ohio-sets-november-special-election-leaving-pelosi-with-empty-seat-most-of-the-year/

Ohio’s Secretary of State announced Thursday that the special election to replace former Rep. Marcia L. Fudge in the 11th District will take place on Nov. 2, leaving Speaker Nancy Pelosi with an empty seat for most of the year.

The November election is the latest for the five House seats that are vacant. Louisiana has a special election for two open seats on Saturday, while Texans will vote in May and New Mexicans in June. The decision of when to fill Fudge’s seat in a heavily Democratic district was up to Ohio’s Republican state officials, who said in a news release that they followed a similar process when then-Speaker John A. Boehner, a Republican, resigned in 2015. At the time, the GOP majority in the House was more than 30 seats.

But with the House narrowly divided — there are currently 219 Democrats and 211 Republicans — Pelosi has few votes to spare, and an empty seat that the party won with 80 percent of the vote in November could put pressure on more vulnerable members. 

‘Tough’ U.S.-China talks signal rocky start to relations under Biden By Humeyra Pamuk, David Brunnstrom, Michael Martina

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-alaska/u-s-chinese-diplomats-clash-in-first-high-level-meeting-of-biden-administration-idUSKBN2BA2A7?il=0

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – U.S. and Chinese officials concluded on Friday what Washington called “tough and direct” talks in Alaska, which laid bare the depth of tensions between the world’s two largest economies at the outset of the Biden administration.

The two days of meetings, the first high-level in-person talks since President Joe Biden took office, wrapped up after a rare and fiery kickoff on Thursday when the two sides publicly skewered each others’ policies in front of TV cameras.

The talks appeared to yield no diplomatic breakthroughs – as expected – but the bitter rivalry on display suggested the two countries had little common ground to reset relations that have sunk to the lowest level in decades.

The run-up to the discussions in Anchorage, which followed visits by U.S. officials to allies Japan and South Korea, was marked by a flurry of moves by Washington that showed it was taking a firm stance, as well as by blunt talk from Beijing warning the United States to discard illusions that it would compromise.

“We expected to have tough and direct talks on a wide range of issues, and that’s exactly what we had,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters moments after the Chinese delegation left the hotel meeting room.

Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter Eager to obtain vindication for the pre-election falsehood they spread about the Hunter Biden story, journalists falsely claim that the CIA blamed Russia for it. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/journalists-illustrating-how-they

Journalists with the largest and most influential media outlets disseminated an outright and quite significant lie on Tuesday to hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, on Twitter. While some of them were shamed into acknowledging the falsity of their claim, many refused to, causing it to continue to spread up until this very moment. It is well worth examining how they function because this is how they deceive the public again and again, and it is why public trust in their pronouncements has justifiably plummeted.

The lie they told involved claims of Russian involvement in the procurement of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, The New York Post obtained that laptop and published a series of articles about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. In response, Twitter banned the posting of any links to that reporting and locked The Post out of its Twitter account for close to two weeks, while Facebook, through a long-time Democratic operative, announced that it would algorithmically suppress the reporting.

The excuse used by those social media companies for censoring this reporting was the same invoked by media outlets to justify their refusal to report the contents of these documents: namely, that the materials were “Russian disinformation.” That claim of “Russian disinformation” was concocted by a group of several dozen former CIA officials and other operatives of the intelligence community devoted to defeating Trump. Immediately after The Post published its first story about Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine that traded on his influence with his father, these career spies and propagandists, led by Obama CIA Director and serial liar John Brennan, published a letter asserting that the appearance of these Biden documents “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

News outlets uncritically hyped this claim as fact even though these security state operatives themselves admitted: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails…are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” Even though this claim came from trained liars who, with uncharacteristic candor, acknowledged that they did not “have evidence” for their claim, media outlets uncritically ratified this assertion.

For One Brief Moment, WH Calls Border Surge a ‘Crisis’ . By Philip Wegmann

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/19/for_one_brief_moment_wh_calls_border_surge_a_crisis_145441.html

At the White House on Thursday, the president’s press secretary was confirming reports that the United States had agreed to supply Mexico with excess coronavirus vaccine when she stumbled into a potential problem.

The two nations have struggled to stem the surge of migrants at the southern U.S. border, and reporters wondered whether the agreement to send doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine was part of a larger agreement to increase cooperation on border security.

“There have been expectations set outside of, unrelated to, any vaccine doses or requests for them, that they would be partners in dealing with the crisis on the border,” Jen Psaki said, accidentally repeating the exact term the White House has taken pains to avoid.

Even as the number of crossing attempts reaches its highest level in two decades, Democrats have rejected Republican claims that the situation is “Biden’s border crisis.” In fact, the administration has refused to call it a crisis at all. That is, until Thursday afternoon.

“When you were talking about how to go about diplomatic negotiations between the United States and Mexico, you said ‘crisis on the border,'” RealClearPolitics started to ask.

“Challenges on the border,” Psaki quickly interjected.

WATCH: Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL-19)Says Biden’s Tax Increases Will Hurt Low-Income Americans By Gabe Kaminsky

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/18/watch-rep-byron-donalds-says-bidens-tax-increases-will-hurt-low-income-americans/

Freshman congressman Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., blasted President Biden’s for hinting at tax increases during his recent “Good Morning America” interview Wednesday.

Speaking to Jan Jeffcoat on The National Desk Thursday, Donalds explained why raising taxes hurts even lower-income Americans.

“If you take money away from people, even the quote-unquote rich, what happens is they have less money to spend. If there is less money to spend, there is less money flowing through the economy. If there is less money flowing through the economy — who does that hurt? It hurts middle-income Americans and poor Americans,” Donalds said.

How Arabs Discriminate Against Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17097/arabs-discrimination-palestinians

“Palestinians have effectively been stripped of their identity and travel documents by successive Iraqi governments,” according to another report by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

In 2003 alone, 344 Palestinian families were forcibly expelled from their homes [in Iraq] by militias. Between 2003 and 2016, an estimated 300 Palestinian refugees were killed by these militias…. Palestinians have been demonized even in social media posts as potential ‘terrorists’ by accounts linked to the [Iraqi] interior ministry.” — Al-Araby Al-Jadeed.

In 2017, Iraqi President Fuad Masum approved a law that stripped Palestinian refugees living in Iraq of their rights and classified them as foreigners.

The international reaction would, of course, have been completely different if Israel taken such measures against Palestinians. Evidently, no one really does care about the plight of the Palestinians. They are only cared about if they can be made to appear as victims of Israel, never of an Arab country.

Palestinian leaders are much too busy attacking Israel and demanding that the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecute Israelis for alleged “war crimes” against the Palestinians to notice the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of an Arab country.

The ICC, which appears obsessed with Israel, is unlikely to launch an investigation into Iraq’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Likewise, the United Nations Security Council is unlikely to hold an emergency session to denounce Iraq for its discriminatory measures against the Palestinians. The international media, for its part, will also continue their usually venomous — and usually unjustified — attacks on Israel, while ignoring the horrendous treatment the Palestinians receive from their Arab brothers.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has invited Iraq to send observers to monitor the Palestinian parliamentary elections, if and when they are held on May 22. The invitation was extended to Mohamed al-Halbousi, Speaker of the Council of Representatives of Iraq, by the PA ambassador to Iraq, Ahmed Akl, during a meeting in Baghdad.

It is not clear whether the Iraqis have accepted the invitation. What is clear, however, is that Iraq is among the many Arab countries where Palestinians continue to face discriminatory measures and laws.

Worse, it seems the Iraqi authorities are carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing against the few thousand Palestinians who still live in Iraq.

MORE HEADLINES MARCH 19, 2021

FULL LIST of 69 Executive Orders and Actions Already Taken By President Biden https://brigittegabriel.com/news/record-69-executive-orders-and-actions-already-taken-by-president-biden

Poll: 47% Say ‘Others Making Decisions’ for Joe Biden at White House https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/17/poll-47-say-others-making-decisions-joe-biden-white-house/

Migrant Children Will ‘End Up in Sex Trafficking’: Texas Lt. Governor https://www.theepochtimes.com/migrant-children-will-end-up-in-sex-trafficking-texas-lt-governor_3738139.html

Poll: Cuban-American Voters in Florida Align Overwhelmingly with GOP https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/03/16/poll-cuban-american-voters-florida-align-overwhelmingly-gop/

The ‘Great Reset’ — the Animal Farm version https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/the_great_reset__the_animal_farm_version_.html

What weird contradiction will Anthony Fauci spin next? By Anthony Castellito

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

Fauci is his name, and deception his game.

Various questions remain, even a few months after the emergency use authorization of vaccines designed to target the enigma that is COVID-19.

Is the ultimate purpose of the non-FDA-approved vaccines to stop the spread of infection, or is it primarily to lessen the symptoms and severity of COVID-19?  If viral spread is at least partially attributed to asymptomatic carriers, how will a lessening of symptoms via mass vaccination prevent further spread?  And if a majority of those infected don’t have symptoms, why should they take the vaccine?  How is herd immunity achieved if the vaccines offered only lessens the symptoms?  These are just a few of the questions that Dr. Fauci has thus far insufficiently addressed.

Thankfully, Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez is doing the job our compromised media are paid not to.  (See here, with excellent audio commentary at the 27 minute mark.)

Fauci is a living, breathing barrage of circular reasoning and manufactured confusion.  He is the Tasmanian devil of doublespeak, a tireless truth-spinner with a shameless capacity to contradict himself at every turn.  His expertise in immunology pales in comparison to his mastery of duplicity.  The scope and magnitude of his contradictory affirmations astound as Fauci continues to promote the same molecular tests he admitted are set to CT levels that produce the majority of false positives, which in turn are used to establish the perception that asymptomatic infection is the default catalyst for mass viral spread despite the fact that Fauci himself claimed that “in all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks” as recently as January of last year.  

ISIS in Mozambique ‘beheading’ children, reports say “One mother told the agency she had had to watch as her 12-year-old son was killed in this way close to where she was hiding with her other children.”

https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/isis-in-mozambique-beheading-children-reports-

ISIS-linked extremists are reportedly beheading children in Mozambique, the BBC claimed on Wednesday.

The global jihadist movement has largely been defeated in the Middle East, but the genocidal Islamist extremism that it once sought to bring to Iraq and Syria is now being carried out in areas in Africa. For many years, various groups linked to Al Qaeda or Islamist extremists percolated across the Sahel and in Somalia. They have now spread down to Mozambique and its Cabo Delgado region.

When claims of ISIS extremists infiltrating and taking root in Mozambique first appeared years ago, some scoffed at the notion. This was the same narrative that cast doubt on Boko Haram in Nigeria. In 2012 an article at The New York Times claimed that there was no proof that a “well-organized, ideologically coherent terrorist group called Boko Haram even exists.”

Mixed Messaging and Silencing Campaign Fuel Vaccine Skepticism If politicians and public health authorities want someone to blame for people’s reluctance to get a vaccine, they should take a long look in the mirror. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/18/mixed-messaging-and-silencing-campaign-fuel-vaccine-skepticism/

It took a Mexican comedian to do the job the American news media refuses to do.

During a series of pointed questions, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted the COVID-19 vaccines won’t stop people from contracting the virus; the shots only lessen the symptoms if a recipient is later infected with SARS-CoV-2.

“There’s a 95 percent chance you will not get a symptomatic infection,” Fauci told Eugenio Derbez last week. “We are unsure right now what the protection is against infection because it’s conceivable you could get vaccinated, get exposed, get infected, not know it . . . but you could have virus in your nasal pharynx.”

Fauci continued spinning. Since no one knows whether the vaccine prevents transmission, Fauci warned, even vaccinated people must wear a mask if “they’re around people who are vulnerable to infection.” It will be at least a few more months before researchers know for certain the risk level of a vaccinated person infecting someone else, Fauci said.

Derbez clearly made the deified public health expert—you can now buy a t-shirt telling the world you received your “Fauci ouchie,” referring to the vaccine—squirm. Accustomed to softball interviews by swooning American journalists, Fauci was unprepared to face tough questions.

But his responses exposed the confusing, and frankly unconvincing, promotional campaign for COVID-19 vaccines. Americans generally understand vaccines to be a safeguard against getting a harmful virus, not an immunity booster to make the resultant disease more manageable. This is especially true of a highly contagious virus that can be lethal to the elderly, obese, or immuno-compromised. No one expected the vaccine merely would act as an injectable version of DayQuil or a vitamin pack but with unknown side effects.

Legitimate Questions

After a year of hyperbolic fear-mongering and warning life only could “return to normal” after widespread immunizations, the COVID chicken hawks are finally coming home to roost. Questions abound.

How will “normalcy” return when someone can still contract and transmit the virus after vaccination? What’s the point of getting the shots if you, and everyone else, must still wear a mask? If mask-wearing and social distancing must continue until we have more solid answers about vaccine efficacy, why not delay the program until more is known? If getting the vaccine doesn’t protect my family or neighbor, why bother? What about stories and data showing moderate to severe side effects, which in some cases are more debilitating than the disease itself?

Unfortunately, those rational inquiries apparently make you a dreaded “anti-vaxxer.” Americans are instructed not to doubt anything coming from the very same authorities who’ve been wrong on everything since the start of the pandemic. Suspicions are silenced rather than honestly addressed. And it all looks very familiar.