The Biden Parenthesis Opens by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16870/biden-parenthesis

On relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Biden holds the strong card of sanctions devised under Obama and applied under Trump. Obama offered only carrots and failed. Trump offered only stick and didn’t achieve his aim of a photo-op with the top mullah, Ali Khamenei, or even Hassan Rouhani. Biden is in a stronger position than Obama or Trump because the Khomeinist regime is weaker than four years ago.

Adopting the Paris Climate Accord is also not easy. Last week, signatories cheekily admitted they had not implemented it.

Many Americans hope that Trump’s tenure will prove to be a mere parenthesis. They don’t know that Biden’s term will also be a parenthesis.

With the Electoral College confirming Joe Biden as the winner of last month’s election, it is almost certain he will be confirmed as the next president of the United States on 6 January.

And, unless something surrealistic happens, he would take the oath of office on 20 January.

What might a Biden presidency look like?

Given the peculiarities of American democracy, such speculation amounts to giving a hostage to fortune. Presidents predicted to lead the nation into disaster turned out to have the safest pairs of hands. Those who inspired romantic dreams dropped into banality as Icarus did when his wings melted.

Some observers believe that Biden’s administration will be a third term for former President Barack Obama. Biden was Obama’s Vice President for eight years, and a large number of people he has picked in his team are Obama alumni.

I think they are wrong.

Pentagon, Biden Transition Team Spar Over Canceled Meetings By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/12/19/pentagon-biden-transition-team-spar-over-canceled-meetings-n1221011

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller has canceled all planned meetings between the Biden transition team and Pentagon officials, setting off some hysterical handwringing from the media.

The move is temporary, according to Pentagon officials, but Biden’s transition lackeys are apparently still in campaign mode. They are  “concerned” about “an abrupt halt to the already limited cooperation,” which sounds more like a candidate surrogate complaining than someone trying to set up a government.

Defense News:

Axios first reported Friday morning that acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, who was installed at the Pentagon days after the Nov. 3 election, had ordered scheduled meetings to be canceled. After the initial report, the Pentagon pushed back, saying the pause was a rescheduling of meetings for Friday due to “competing priorities” for officials, and that meetings would open up again in the new year, following what was described as a planned two-week Christmas break.

What might those “competing priorities” be? The Pentagon says they have an agreed-upon pause in the discussions as they break for the Christmas holidays for two weeks.

“After the mutually-agreed-upon holiday pause, which begins tomorrow, we will continue with the transition and rescheduled meetings from today,” the statement added. “Again, I remain committed to a full and transparent transition — this is what our nation expects and the DoD will deliver AS IT ALWAYS HAS.”

However, at a Friday briefing, Biden transition spokespeople Yohannes Abraham and Jen Psaki denied there was an agreed upon holiday pause and called for the Pentagon to immediately restart the discussions.

Failed Mayor of Atlanta Under Investigation Demands More Important Job from Biden Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/12/failed-mayor-atlanta-under-investig

Hey Joe, you can’t just buy off Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta with any old cabinet position. It must be a position commensurate with her incredible talents.

Joe Biden implored Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to accept a job heading the Small Business Administration earlier this week, a lesser position she rejected after he characterized it as “only the first step” for her during his presidency, according to people familiar with the discussion.

“Implored”. 

Lance Bottoms, a rising African American star and favorite of powerful Rep. James Clyburn, is open to serving in the Cabinet during his term if the role is right, one person told Axios.

Clyburn, if you recall, handed the primary to Biden, and has a lot of chips to call in.

Bottoms’ allies describe her as a family-oriented politician — she has four young children — who’s weighing the massive lifestyle change a move to Washington, D.C. would require against the nature of the work she’d be undertaking.

While interested in small business development, leading a Cabinet-level agency like SBA was not the right fit for the chief executive of a major city — a position of considerable clout in the New South that Lance Bottoms loves, one person familiar with her thinking told Axios.

Considerable clout. You can’t just offer Bottoms any position. It’s gotta be a lot more important than a mere pork factory like the SBA. Not when you’re dealing with the incredible dynamo running the Atlanta hellscape into the ground after battling her ethics issues.

The court date has been reset for Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to respond to a subpoena for alleged ethics violations.

Who has the power to appoint presidential electors? By Leo Donofrio

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/who_has_the_power_to_appoint_presidential_electors.html

Now that inferior election officials in Arizona have rejected a legally issued legislative subpoena from the Arizona Senate Judiciary committee to turn over Dominion machines and software for inspection, the Legislature of Arizona must use its enforcement powers to compel these officials to respect their plenary authority over presidential elector appointment.

But what enforcement authority is available to the Arizona Legislature?  It’s not the Judiciary.  And it’s not a sheriff, or state capital police.  The Arizona Legislature has plenary authority over appointing presidential electors.  All it has to do is self-convene by quorum in each branch, or by joint ballot, then vote to send Trump electors; then send the slate to Washington, D.C.  That’s how you enforce the subpoena.

But then you do one more thing, Arizona Legislature.  You sprint into federal district court, and you demand a Writ of Prohibition against Vice President Pence, ordering him not to open the previous slate of presidential electors sent by Arizona.  And you will win that writ.  Here’s why:

3 USC §§5–15 ARE UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Congress cannot order a state Legislature regarding how to exercise its plenary authority.  All Congress can do is set the time presidential electors must be appointed (see the federal Election Day statute) and when electors must meet and give their ballots.  My previous report on the timing proved that the hard deadline is January 4, 2021 and that December 14 was not the last possible date.  There’s still time for each contested result to be set straight by the state Legislatures.

Everyone should read and study the undisputed SCOTUS precedent on plenary authority of the state Legislatures over choosing presidential electors, McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1, 36 (1892):

‘Whatever provisions may be made by statute, or by the state constitution, to choose electors by the people, there is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated.’

As runoffs loom, Georgia’s election integrity is a joke By Julio Rivera

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/as_runoffs_loom_georgias_election_integrity_is_a_joke.html

Although it seems as though it took place long ago, in a year that has seemed to drag on from one low point to another, the November 3 election happened less than seven weeks ago.  Ever since then, countless personal accounts of election irregularities, conflicting reporting from partisan media, and the numerous delays from many GOP leaders in accepting the possibility of Joe Biden being sworn in as our 46th president have been the political reality in America.

At the core of our current state of disputation is the question of election integrity.  We’ve seen numerous legal challenges and thousands of affidavits filed and have had to go through the exercise of observing “social media lawyers” misusing legalese and framing irrelevant or fallacious arguments, and yet we still do not know how safe and secure the American election system really is going forward, post-2020.

In the state of Georgia, where the eyes of the nation have turned in advance of a set of pivotal Senate elections that will determine control of Congress’s upper chamber, Republicans have already filed two federal and one state-level lawsuit related to the January 5 run-offs, which have already seen hundreds of thousands of people vote by mail or in person.  The legal challenges primarily centered on the use of drop-boxes for returning absentee ballots as well as raising the level of scrutiny applied in verifying signatures on those ballots.

The two federal suits were dismissed by district judges in the past few days; they opined that the Republican plaintiffs, who were a combination of local, state, and national Republican Party groups, lacked legal standing for their arguments.

Sticking with Trump to the Bitter (or Glorious) End By David Solway

“To defeat Trump,” writes Victor Davis Hanson, “many of our institutions were deformed.” Indeed, we have witnessed a flagrant burlesque of electoral procedure, including the specter of foreign interference by China, Iran and Russia via Dominion Voting Systems in gerrymandering electoral results, as Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has confirmed. And there will be lasting consequences. The effect of installing a parodic figure like Joe Biden, straight out of the Commedia dell’Arte, as the next president of the United States will result in three destabilizing factors.

A nation presided over by a sorry puppet who has been put in place by a political, technological and wealthy elite employing counterfeit means will become progressively dysfunctional. Secondly, an administration that owes its ascendancy to obvious electoral chicanery will look and sound like a banana republic, a wavering shadow of its former self, and an international laughing stock to be taken advantage of by its adversaries and competitors.

Finally, the idea of secession will enter the public domain. Rush Limbaugh worries that America is “trending toward secession.” Texas GOP chairman Allen West suggested that law-abiding states should “bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the Constitution.” Though he asserted “I never say anything about secession,” the implication is certainly present. Texit is in the wind. As Rep. Kyle Biedermann (R-Fredericksburg) said, “I am committing to file legislation this session that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.”

Attorney Frank Friday has an amusing blog post at American Thinker, dismissing the notion of secession as unworkable and advocating instead for a football-league model of blue state realignment with Canada (Can-America) — as if Canada would be interested. Red state Big America would assume the burden of responsible statecraft and constitutional probity. The article is a lighthearted spoof, gets a dig in at Mark Levin’s eminently sensible The Liberty Amendments, but buries the alarming possibility of a secession scenario, along the lines, perhaps, of the “velvet divorce” which divided Czechoslovakia into Czech Republic and Slovakia. Of course, the conditions were far simpler then, for obvious historical and territorial reasons, but stand as a template for pragmatic action.

Lockdowns Do Not Control the Coronavirus: The Evidence

https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-coronavirus-the-evidence/

The use of universal lockdowns in the event of the appearance of a new pathogen has no precedent. It has been a science experiment in real time, with most of the human population used as lab rats. The costs are legion. 

The question is whether lockdowns worked to control the virus in a way that is scientifically verifiable. Based on the following studies, the answer is no and for a variety of reasons: bad data, no correlations, no causal demonstration, anomalous exceptions, and so on. There is no relationship between lockdowns (or whatever else people want to call them to mask their true nature) and virus control. 

Perhaps this is a shocking revelation, given that universal social and economic controls are becoming the new orthodoxy. In a saner world, the burden of proof really should belong to the lockdowners, since it is they who overthrew 100 years of public-health wisdom and replaced it with an untested, top-down imposition on freedom and human rights. They never accepted that burden. They took it as axiomatic that a virus could be intimidated and frightened by credentials, edicts, speeches, and masked gendarmes. 

The pro-lockdown evidence is shockingly thin, and based largely on comparing real-world outcomes against dire computer-generated forecasts derived from empirically untested models, and then merely positing that stringencies and “nonpharmaceutical interventions” account for the difference between the fictionalized vs. the real outcome. The anti-lockdown studies, on the other hand, are evidence-based, robust, and thorough, grappling with the data we have (with all its flaws) and looking at the results in light of controls on the population. 

Showtime’s Pathetic Exercise in Reagan Bashing By Alvin S. Felzenberg

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/showtimes-pathetic-exercise-in-reagan-bashing/amp/

The network’s The Reagans doc traffics in misstatements, partial truths, and strategic omissions to pin Trump’s rise on the late president.

In making its programming decisions for the interval between the end of the 2020 presidential election and the holiday season, the top brass at Showtime reverted to what had once been standard fare in Hollywood and elsewhere: Reagan bashing. Over four successive Sundays, the network released yet another hour of its tedious and repetitious documentary, The Reagans.

Warning to the uninitiated: Do not mistake what comes before you as an update of anything like PBS’s extraordinary presentation of Reagan and his era as part of its “American Experience” repertoire. What you see on Showtime is neither objective history nor a fair-minded attempt to review past controversies through the perspective of the present. Its creator, Matt Tyrnauer, to his credit, is straightforward about that. He is a man with a mission.

His thesis is simple: that Ronald Reagan, through a series of “dog whistles,” carefully woven into his rhetoric, paved the way for Donald Trump’s angrier form of populism, with policies that promote white supremacy as the intended legacies of both presidents. Whatever history’s final judgment of Trump may be, few would doubt that this is a lot to pin on Ronald Reagan. In comparing the two presidents, the creators overlook some essential facts: Reagan twice won the presidency in two landslides, both in the popular vote and in the Electoral College. Trump twice lost the popular vote and prevailed in Electoral College once and narrowly. Hidden in the numbers are the hopes and expectations the American people placed in both presidents and how the presidents regarded them.The only obvious similarity the documentary draws between Reagan and Trump is that both were entertainers. Both knew how to reach and move audiences, the filmmakers say — as if the calm reassuring Sunday night host of G.E. Theater, who entered into American living rooms every week after Ed Sullivan for eight years, was anything like the carnival-barking star of reality television, famous for his loud utterance of the two words: “You’re fired!” Both had audiences, but they related to them in different ways.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/showtimes-pathetic-exercise-in-reagan-bashing/amp/

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Mutating cancer cells. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute, working with others in the Netherlands and Norway, have discovered that melanoma cells can “frameshift” to grow whilst avoiding the immune system. The process, however, generates new peptides (short proteins) that scientists can now target with new therapies.

https://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/life-sciences/how-cancers-hurt-themselves-hurt-immune-cells-more

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-researchers-spot-new-peptides-that-could-point-way-to-slaying-cancer/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03054-1

Gastro sensor gets “breakthrough” designation. (TY Nevet & UWI) Israel’s Exero Medical (reported here previously) has received Breakthrough device designation by the US FDA for its implantable biodegradable wireless sensor designed to continuously monitor for gastrointestinal leaks and healing status after surgery.

https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/exero-medicals-smart-sensor-granted-fda-breakthrough-designation-301192665.html

Covid-19 vaccine progress. The Israeli-developed BriLife Covid-19 vaccine is moving into Phase 2 trials. Hospitals including Sheba and Hadassah will test the vaccine on 1,000 volunteers including seniors and those with previous conditions. Meanwhile rollout of the Pfizer vaccine began – the Israeli PM first to be vaccinated.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-corona-vaccine-approved-for-phase-2-trials/

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/israels-vaccine-candidate-set-to-launch-phase-ii-clinical-trial-652110

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/293351 https://youtu.be/SuNJQ85eG6o

One ventilator for 3 patients. Israel’s Yehonatan Medical together with Sheba Medical Center have devised a ventilation system with a high-power output and built-in disinfecting mechanism that can treat between three and five patients simultaneously. It includes AI technology for alerting and adjusting to patient responsiveness.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/12/14/israeli-ventilation-system-could-give-covid-the-smart-treatment/

More intelligent Covid-19 treatment. Israel’s Iguazio (reported here previously) is to provide Israel’s Sheba Medical Center with clinical, real-time predictive insights from its AI Data Science Platform to help optimize care for Covid-19 patients. Iguazio’s systems will also help Sheba reduce delays in transporting patients.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3882399,00.html

Doctors arrive to help fight Covid-19. The Israel Experience Doctors’ Program has just brought 50 qualified doctors to Israel to help alleviate the coronavirus crisis. The doctors intend to make Aliya and simultaneously will prepare for Israeli medical licensing. 700 graduates of the program are already working in Israeli hospitals.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/293141

UV wavelength Covid-19 discovery. The ability of UV light to kill Covid-19 is well known. However, Tel Aviv University tests show UV with a wavelength of 285 nanometers kills 99.9% of the virus in 30 seconds – nearly as good as UV at 265nm. 285nm UV LED bulbs are cheaper and more readily available than 265nm.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/israeli-corona-discovery-uv-led-lights-kill-covid-19/

Brain-monitoring app tests for post-Covid symptoms. Israel’s Montfort (reported here previously) has enhanced its AI smartphone app that monitors neurological conditions. After six months of trials in Brazil, it now offers a test protocol for patients who have recovered from Covid-19 but still suffer long-lasting effects.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3881692,00.html https://www.mon4t.com/covid-19/

$30 million for emergency department. Philanthropist Sylvan Adams has donated $30 million to fund a new Emergency Medicine department at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center. A similar amount was allocated by the Israeli government. It will take two years to construct and will be the largest ER in Israel.

https://www.jns.org/sylvan-adams-donates-30-million-for-new-emergency-department-in-tel-aviv/

The Banality of BILL BARR Thomas J. Farnan

https://thenationalpulse.com/commentary/the-banality-of-bill-barr/

In June, Attorney General Bill Barr sat for an interview in CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer and predicted widespread fraud with mail in voting.

He said: “People trying to change the rules to this, to this methodology – which, as a matter of logic, is very open to fraud and coercion – is reckless and dangerous and people are playing with fire.”

At the time, Barr was the nation’s top law enforcement officer with an obligation to prevent election fraud under a bevy of federal statutes.

What He Could’ve Done.

Maybe an investigation of Silicon Valley billionaires ballot harvesting in black neighborhoods, for starters, and then a warrant for surveillance cameras at counting facilities in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Detroit, with federal agents on hand to double check the chain of custody of boxes coming through the back door.

Instead, election integrity was preserved with federal investigations to prevent nonexistent seditious activity emanating from dubious white militias. The “reckless and dangerous” mail-in ballot operation the Attorney General warned about was ignored.

Trump’s political rise is because our institutions no longer work for the common good and instead serve the idiosyncratic preferences of the sclerotic establishment. Picking a bombastic outsider is the only way that 75-million Americans know to tell them to cut it out.