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Joe Biden’s COVID Deceptions By David Harsanyi

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/joe-bidens-covid-deceptions/

He has gone back on a campaign promise to change the virus’s trajectory and set as a goal a rate of vaccination that the U.S. had already met or exceeded.

P resident Joe Biden contends there is “nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months,” which is the exact opposite of what presidential candidate Joe Biden promised voters during the 2020 campaign. And by “exact opposite,” I mean the president’s alleged plan to beat coronavirus literally said that “the trajectory of COVID-19 in America is headed in the wrong direction” and only he could fix it.

The Biden “plan” amounted to a slew of nebulous promises that would be implemented to correct the “Trump fiasco,” such as accelerating the development of a vaccine, producing more masks, and pressuring governors to sign mask mandates. Biden repeatedly promised to alter the trajectory of COVID. In a platitudinous October 23 speech, Biden pledged to “immediately put in place a national strategy that will position our country to finally get ahead of this virus and get back our lives.”

“Immediately” is an adverb meaning at once, instantly, without any intervening time. It does not mean waiting around to take credit for when the Trump-era vaccines kick in.

One of the silliest talking points pushed by left-wing pundits during the election was to say that Biden had warned us about the pandemic. Evidence of this contention revolves around a single USA Today column in which the then–presidential candidate noted that there were at “least five cases” of COVID in the United States, and there “will likely be more.” Hardly Nostradamus.

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Gregg Jarrett: Pelosi seeks retaliation in Trump impeachment trial — get ready for ‘the sequel’ It is time to end the politics of revenge

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/pelosi-trump-impeachment-trial-gregg-jarrett

Here we go again. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slowly and somberly walking an article of impeachment through the Capitol flanked by House managers giving their best impression of a funeral procession. Except this time, they’re wearing Covid masks.  

Let’s call it “Impeachment: The Sequel.” It is destined to be as pitiable as the original. Like a cheap movie franchise that Hollywood keeps exploiting, this sham version will be the equivalent of a box office dud. 

Mugging for the cameras, Pelosi will probably mutter something about “making history,” as she did before.  Maybe she’ll again pass out souvenir signing pens like lollipops at a town carnival.  It’s an insult to charades.  Pelosi seeks retaliation masquerading as impeachment.  

The first impeachment trial in the Senate a year ago was a baseless fiasco that ended in the easy acquittal of President Trump. Democrats did not come close to mustering the two-thirds majority votes required for conviction and removal from office.  That predictable outcome rendered the entire exercise a colossal waste of time. 

It is almost certain that the sequel will mimic the same bad ending.  Democrats in the House rushed through an ineptly crafted article of impeachment accusing Trump of “inciting an insurrection” when he delivered a speech on the nation’s mall on January 6, 2021, and criminals chose to riot inside the Capitol building. 

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Making America California The Biden administration seems determined to run the country on the ruinous model of the Golden State. Joel Kotkin

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/biden-touts-california-as-model-for-america

As the Biden administration settles in and begins to formulate its agenda, progressive pundits, politicians, and activists point to California as a role model for national policy. If the administration listens to them, it would prove a disaster for America’s already-beleaguered middle and working classes.

Biden, suggests an ecstatic account in the Los Angeles Times, seeks to “make America California again,” and he will have plenty of help. Californians will run Health and Human Services, the Treasury, Homeland Security, and Energy. Former California senator Kamala Harris is vice president, and San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi rules the House of Representatives. Progressives like Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca see the shift as embracing “California’s distinctive approach to market capitalism.” The Golden State, they insist, can “show the way forward” toward a more socially just future.

As a California resident for nearly half a century, I wonder if these worthies see the same state I do. California has its wonderful spots, great neighborhoods, beautiful vistas, amazing entrepreneurs, and great amenities, but it makes a poor advertisement for social democracy. It suffers the nation’s highest poverty rate and presents the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle income earners of any state. Minorities—notably African-Americans and Latinos—do worse in California’s metros than elsewhere in the country, according to a recent study that we conducted at the Urban Reform Institute. In Atlanta, African-American median incomes, adjusted for costs, are almost double those in San Francisco and Los Angeles; Latinos earn $20,000 more in midwestern and southern cities than in the enlightened metros along the California coast.

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Indonesia Set to Take on China and Claim Leadership of “Moderate” Islam By Dr. James M. Dorsey

Posted By on January 26th, 2021

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/indonesia-moderate-islam/

Indonesian president Joko Widodo’s recent cabinet reshuffle suggests that Indonesia may adopt a more critical attitude toward China and reinforce government support for efforts by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the world’s largest Muslim movement, to reform Islam and position the Southeast Asian state as a key player in a battle with Middle Eastern rivals for the soul of Islam.

Indonesian president Joko Widodo signaled some potential policy moves with the recent appointment of ambassador to the US Muhammad Lutfi as trade minister and prominent Nahdlatul Ulama official Yaqut Cholil Qoumas as minister of religious affairs.

Lutfi’s appointment came two months after a visit by Mike Pompeo to Jakarta in October at the invitation of Nahdlatul Ulama during which the Secretary of State extended Indonesia’s access to a preferential tariff arrangement and opened the door to a free trade agreement with the US.

Pompeo emphasized in talks with Widodo and in an address to a Nahdlatul Ulama conference the need to challenge China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea as well as its brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims in the People’s Republic’s northwestern province of Xinjiang.

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, extradited to China three Uighurs, the dominant Turkic ethnic group in Xinjiang, just days before Pompeo’s arrival.

Qoumas’s appointment is significant not only because of his prominent Nahdlatul Ulama background but also because he is one of the leaders of the movement’s most influential wing, which has adopted a tough position on China’s repression of the Uighurs.

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Rand Paul pushes back against Stephanopoulos narrative By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/rand_paul_pushes_back_against_stephanopoulos_narrative.html

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  The latter tried to bully Paul into accepting the Democrat narrative that Joe Biden, a corrupt, debauched old man who periodically emerged from the basement to “campaign” for president, won more votes than any candidate in presidential history, including Obama, the first sort of Black president, and Hillary, the first genetically female presidential candidate.  Sen. Paul not only refused to be bullied, but he pushed back, exposing to viewers the fact that Stephanopoulos is not a journalist but is, instead, a Democrat party activist.

Stephanopoulos entered politics early, working for Michael Dukakis’s 1988 presidential campaign when Stephanopoulos was in his mid-20s.  In 1992, he was back again working for Bill Clinton’s campaign, making his name as a spokesman for Clinton both during and after the election.  Beginning in 1996, Stephanopoulos left the White House for ABC, and he’s been there ever since.

Although technically a “journalist,” Stephanopoulos is famously partisan, routinely serving as an attack dog for the Democrat party.  He certainly showed that side of himself in the interview with Sen. Paul.

What Stephanopoulos hadn’t counted on is that Paul has an advantage compared to many of the elected officials, bureaucrats, and assorted famous people whom Stephanopoulos bullies…er, interviews on his show.  Paul is a principled man.  His values do not change depending on where he sees an advantage to himself.  That gives him a moral clarity that makes it impossible to bully him, as Stephanopoulos discovered to his cost.

In the clip that’s making the rounds on the internet, Stephanopoulos opened by demanding that Paul recite the current leftist catechism, which is that Slow Joe, AKA Basement Biden, won the election fair and square: “Ah, Sen. Paul.  Let me begin with a threshold question for you.  This election was not stolen.  Do you accept that fact?”

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Rupert Murdoch rails against ‘awful woke orthodoxy’ while accepting award By Dominick Mastrangelo

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/535732-rupert-murdoch-rails-against-awful-woke-orthodoxy-while-accepting-award?utm_source=thehill&utm_medium=widgets&utm_campaign=es_recommended_content

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch blasted so-called cancel culture and a “woke orthodoxy” that he described as “awful” and suggested was a threat to the free exchange of ideas in the U.S. and around the world.

“For those of us in the media, there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential,” Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp., said in recorded remarks while receiving an award from the Australia Day Foundation, according to The New York Times.

“This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility,” Murdoch added. “Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”

Video of the remarks was also posted on the website of the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper owned by Murdoch, whose media ownership includes Fox News and the New York Post.

Many GOP lawmakers and media commentators on the right have decried “cancel culture,” calling it a concerted effort by those on the left to suppress opposing viewpoints.

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Cancel culture comes for the moderates By Andrew Koppelman

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/535512-cancel-culture-comes-for-the-moderates

The increasing tendency to interpret obviously sarcastic metaphors of violence as if they were real threats makes me want to kill somebody. Am I in trouble because I wrote that? That would be silly, wouldn’t it?   

If you read that sentence as an actual call for violence, you are at best a careless reader. It’s an obviously insincere, satirical claim about my state of mind. It doesn’t call for anyone to do anything. Does it mean that I’m threatening someone? Who? 

The pressure to cancel people because they have violated vague and unpredictable norms has claimed its latest victim in Will Wilkinson, who was vice president for research at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, and who (tenuously) remains a New York Times contributing opinion writer. His firing is particularly depressing, because Niskanen has been one of the most useful sources of independent, contrarian policy analysis. It was started by Cato Institute refugees who were disaffected with the Institute’s dishonest climate change denial. They thought, correctly, that libertarianism properly understood does not allow businesses to harm others, as the fossil fuel industry does. For Niskanen to join the cancellation bandwagon is a major disappointment.

Here’s what happened. After the inauguration, some conservative writers complained that although Biden called for unity, he proposed policies that Republicans could never agree to. “‘Aha! Biden proposes policies I dislike. HIS CALL FOR UNITY IS A LIE!!!’ is all the forlorn conservative mind can seem to muster. Sad,” tweeted Wilkinson.  

Soon after, he followed up with the line that got him fired: “If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence.” 

MEDIA Comments turned off

Five examples of media’s sycophancy for Biden on inauguration week By Joe Concha ****

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/535584-five-examples-of-medias-sycophancy-for-biden-on-inauguration-week

Coverage of presidential inauguration week underperformed already-low expectations, with the usual measured accolades and sober analysis for the incoming president mostly sidelined for fawning praise and outright activism.

The overall theme centered on the premise that President Biden is in essence the second coming of George Washington, who, according to popular lore, vowed never to tell a lie. Anchors and pundits returned to this theme again and again with Biden, who famously dropped out of his first presidential run due to a plagiarism scandal.

Biden also claimed multiple times – including once during last year’s presidential campaign – to have been arrested or jailed when he attempted to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa at the height of Apartheid. After being fact-checked, Biden “clarified” his remarks instead of apologizing, saying he was merely “stopped.” The 78-year-old also told a Black audience in 2012 that then-GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney wanted to “put y’all back in chains,” without any evidence, as many in the media chuckled over the outrageous comment. 

Space limitations make it impossible to share all the examples witnessed this week, so here are the top five examples of the media’s slobbering sycophancy: 

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The U.S. Government Shouldn’t Send Communist China Americans’ DNA And Health Info By Ben Weingarten

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/25/the-u-s-government-shouldnt-send-communis

The Biden administration must take serious steps to ensure China ceases its exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis in ways that threaten our national security.

Some two decades ahead of schedule, on Jan. 12, the Trump administration declassified its Indo-Pacific Strategic Framework, a document outlining its national security strategy regarding Asia. The document is critical, and the timing of its declassification was telling.

As National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien noted in a statement announcing its release, the framework “has provided overarching strategic guidance for implementing the 2017 National Security Strategy within the world’s most populous and economically dynamic region.”

By making the document public just before Inauguration Day — as with its other recent actions and revelations regarding Communist China — the outgoing Trump administration delivered a message to its would-be soft-on-China successor: Do not deviate from the course we have charted in countering our most formidable adversary. A return to appeasement becomes more difficult when the extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s malignant endeavors are laid bare, and the American people can see that there has been a robust plan for confronting it.

Progress Subverted by Bureaucracy

The Trump administration has taken yeoman efforts to implement this strategy, for which America has benefited immeasurably while effectuating a sea change across the federal government in thought and action concerning China. It appears, however, that pockets of resistance remain. Indeed, even the most determined of administrations with the best of strategies can find their plans at times subverted by an obstinate permanent bureaucracy.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Determined Wreckers Scott McKay See note please

Posted By on January 25th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-executive-orders-determined-wrecker/

President Herbert Hoover was an eminently decent man, destroyed by a recession not of his making….not an abject bum like Jimmy Carter….rsk

Last week at my site, just after an inauguration speech Chris Wallace and the rest of the frauds and sycophants in the mainstream media applauded solely because membership in the D.C. cocktail club required it, I posted a historical perspective. It sifted the 20th- and 21st-century presidents into four categories: Positive Change Agents, Competent Managers, Determined Wreckers, and Abject Bums.

Feel free to check out the post to see where President Trump landed. But you won’t find Joe Biden slotted in any of the categories. Not yet.

Biden has a record, of course, and his ideological professions, talent level, and mental acuity are known knowns. That he isn’t a candidate for the first two categories is quite obvious.

But is he an Abject Bum, or a Determined Wrecker?

It isn’t that the answer is complicated. It’s that there are two answers. We can see this pretty easily from checking the things spewing out of Biden’s mouth against the executive orders micturating from his presidential pen.

Biden prattles on about unity and recovery, and he almost seems sincere about it. In fact, if he wasn’t so clearly a man incapable of honesty one might even believe he seeks unity rather than obedience.

Those executive orders, on the other hand, which represent the most violent lurch to the left in the first week of a presidential administration in U.S. history, don’t reflect an Abject Bum administration.

Jimmy Carter was an Abject Bum. So was Herbert Hoover. This is not that, as bum-ish as Biden certainly appears to be.

This is the work of Determined Wreckers, with Biden as their puppet.