FRANCIS MENTON: JOE BIDEN? YOU MUST BE KIDDING!

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

Back in October, after looking some into the Hunter Biden/Burisma situation, and watching a few clips of Joe Biden on the campaign trail, I offered the following insightful prognostication:

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think Joe Biden is going to last much longer in this presidential contest.

That shows you what I know about these things.

The particular context there was a couple of posts I had just researched and written on the Ukraine affair, titled “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked” and “The Bidens: Stone Cold Crooked (2).” My conclusion in the two posts was that there was a lay-down case of corruption against Joe Biden in the Burisma situation, and I couldn’t even see what his defense would be. Yes, Joe could try saying “Sure I got my son $3 million in Ukraine by leveraging foreign aid money put up by U.S. taxpayers, but my motives were pure because I was also getting a corrupt prosecutor fired.” But why would or should anyone buy that line, when Joe could have told his son to get off the board before getting the prosecutor fired?

For several months after those posts, the impeachment business kept the Bidens’ graft in the news, and Joe gradually sank lower in the polls. But then impeachment ended, and now suddenly, after Super Tuesday and mini-Super Tuesday, Joe Biden has become the presumptive Democratic nominee. Really?

Many observers have attributed Joe’s revival to the sudden realization by the “party establishment” and the “donor class,” as the field of prospective candidates was narrowing, of how disastrous a Bernie Sanders nomination could prove to be for the party. If you are unsure of what the terms “party establishment” and “donor class” mean, I would commend to you this December 30, 2019 piece from the New York Law Journal with the headline “Big Law Chairmen and Prominent Trial Lawyers Help Drive Biden Fundraising.” It seems that Biden had just made a campaign finance filing revealing the identities of his top donors and “bundlers.” Summary:

Biden’s newly disclosed list of campaign bundlers includes Big Law chairmen, practice group leaders, prominent trial lawyers and tech and finance executives. The list of 250 names revealed the individuals and couples who have raised at least $25,000 for his presidential run.

Care to name some names?:

MIT Biologist and Inventer of Email – Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai – Says Deep State Fear Mongering on Coronavirus Will Go Down as Biggest Fraud to Manipulate Economies

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/03/mit-biologist-and-inventer-of-email-dr-shiva-ayyadurai-says-deep-state-fear-mongering-on-coronavirus-will-go-down-as-biggest-fraud-to-manipulate-economies/

Ayyadurai is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is best known for his claim to have invented email.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, who performs research nearly every day on the humun immune system, says the coronavirus scare the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!

Dr.SHIVA Ayyadurai, MIT PhD. Inventor of Email

@va_shiva
·
Mar 9

As an MIT PhD in Biological Engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!
Quote Tweet

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump
· Mar 9
The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”

COVID-19 is terrifying — as a weapon of political propaganda Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/covid-19-terrifying-weapon-political-propaganda/

The president delivered an address last night about the Wuhan flu, aka novel coronavirus, aka (if you want to sound scary/scientific ‘COVID-19’).

The speech was brief, but to the point. It outlined a number of practical steps that the administration has taken, and would be taking, to slow the spread of the disease, help those who contract it, and — just as important—rescue the market from the panic that has surrounded this malady.

The wretched Jim Acosta, court jester on CNN, complained about Trump calling the virus ‘foreign’ and his identifying the source of the virus as China. That was ‘smacking of xenophobia’ said the babbling head. I wonder if he feels the same about calling German measles ‘German measles’, worries that Ebola is named after a river in Africa, its source, or that Zika is named after some other God-forsaken place in the dark continent. How about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: is that racist about the Rocky Mountains, Jim?

No, the Wuhan Panic is a textbook case of the Rahm Emanuel principle that you never want a good crisis to go to waste. Emanuel helped Barack Obama weaponize the government against freedom in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008. The Dems and their megaphones in the media are trying to do the same thing now in the face of the spread of the Wuhan Virus. In about three weeks, maybe four, it will all be over and many people will feel sheepish about their overreaction. In the meantime, everyone seems to be signing up to be an extra in The Seventh Seal.

The Great Coronavirus War Is upon Us By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/great-coronavirus-war-stay-calm-rational-easily-defeat-enemy/

If we stay calm and rational, we can easily defeat the enemy, whose reputation is likely far scarier than its reality.

Try this thought experiment. Envision the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, as a living, breathing enemy — which, of course, is exactly what it is.

But imagine for a moment that we are in real war with a cognizant, thinking, and clever enemy whose sole reason to live is to hurt, maim, or kill as many of us as it can.

COVID-19 may not have jets, tanks, or nukes, like our past enemies. But its arsenal, numbers, cunning, and willpower are said to be formidable.

To win its war against Americans, COVID-19 must infect and sicken lots of Americans each day. If it cannot infect enough victims to multiply and sustain a hungry army of viruses, COVID-19 will soon sputter and die. It will get trapped in just a few hosts among an otherwise victorious and healthy nation of about 330 million.

Nature has given COVID-19 some weapons that its defeated cousins — the H1N1 swine flu and the MERS and SARS viruses — lacked.

It is more clever by being less lethal — and a little tougher in its ability to live outside a host. Viral resiliency ensures that it rarely turns into a suicide bomber by dying with a terminally sick host, and that it does not perish so quickly when orphaned in the air and on surfaces.

Democrats respond to Trump’s Oval address with vicious partisan rancor By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/democrats_respond_to_trumps_oval_address_with_vicious_partisan_rancor.html

On Wednesday night, a solemn President Trump spoke for less than ten minutes to tell Americans what steps the federal government has taken and will take to address the spread of coronavirus around the world. These steps include stopping all travel from Europe, payroll tax relief, small business loans, and aide for American workers who become sick or must care for someone who is sick.

Although it was not a flowery speech, Trump reminded Americans that health crises are a fact of life. What matters is how one responds. In the face of the panic sweeping America, Trump promised us that, “This is not a financial crisis. This is just a temporary moment in time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

After detailing the practical steps he will take, Trump ended by saying that America has tremendous financial resilience, which makes his proposals possible, and incredible human capital. He also urged Americans to put aside partisan differences to provide the most robust response to a temporary, albeit severe, problem.

Within minutes, Democrats and Never Trumpers ignored the President’s request that the country works together on the problem. Instead, they swung instantly into action, castigating him for doing nothing (even though he acted quickly to restrict travel from China and quarantine travelers) and dreaming of all the horrible things that should happen to Trump and America.

Here are just a few examples of the hysteria and pure hatred that Democrats and NevertTrumpers expressed for Trump and America itself.

Garry Kasparov, a Never Trumper, voiced an elaborate fantasy that the most successful conservative president in modern American history was motivated by the fact that he’s being exposed as a “fraud”:

Omar gets married. Again… By Ethel C. Fenig

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/and_omar_gets_married_again.html

This is the week that began when we lost an hour as we sprang forward to save daylight and continued with a full spring moon, so close and large, enough to give many of us something to admire … while in self-isolation from coronavirus.  Sigh.

And so, in that spirit, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Somalia in Minnesota) temporarily suspended her professional hate of America to announce, via Instagram:

No, this lucky third husband isn’t her brother as was husband #2 — or was he #1?  He is her married-to-someone else campaign aide and fundraiser who conveniently “earned” several hundred thousand dollars from her campaign when they worked together. But as Omar herself said, they weren’t having an affair, despite that lawsuit from that angry ex-wife who said there was. And now, he is married to Omar.  So she is praising her god for this rather gamy turn of events.  

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-hating Israel in the safety of Michigan) temporarily suspended her eliminate-Israel-and-promote-an-imaginary Palestine campaign  to offer thousands of congratulations.  

The Democrats in Congress aren’t complaining.  They call it ‘diversity.’  

And tomorrow is Friday the thirteenth.  What else will this week bring?  

The GOP chairwoman challenges the leftist narrative that Trump is a do-nothing By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_gop_chairwoman_challenges_the_leftist_narrative_that_trump_is_a_donothing.html

Epidemic illnesses are always going to be scary. That scariness is there even when we marshall the facts. One good fact is that this is the flu, with a probable top mortality rate of 4.6 percent, not the Black Death, with its 40-90 percent mortality rate. Another good fact is that the 4.6 percent rate is dropping because we can track the virus better. We’ve always known how many people died, but we’re learning that more people were sick than was first assumed. As the number of recovered sick people expands, the mortality rate drops.

What makes this outbreak exceptionally frightening, though, is the number of people who want it to be awful. Some of them are just drama queens, reveling in the horror of the moment and the even more horrific possibilities of the future. These people are toxic and need to be avoided.

Worse, though, are those people who see this as Trump’s Waterloo. The problem for them, though, is that the only way Trump can measurably fail is if lots of people die and the entire American system collapses. These people, therefore, are cheering on the possibility of death, economic collapse, and social chaos. That’s not just toxic, that’s evil.

One of the things the Waterloo-wishes are doing is attacking everything Trump has said or done. When he banned flights from China and quarantined people, he was racist. When coronavirus still made it to America, he was ineffective. And when he announced that he was closing flights from Europe, people announced, without a scintilla of evidence, that it was too little too late.

Even before Trump’s latest announcements about slowing the spread of coronavirus and securing the economy, Ronna McDaniel, the GOP Chairwoman, had put out a short thread reminding America what Trump was doing, even as the Democrats were attacking him:

174 House Dems: Convicted Terrorists Must Not Be Barred from Working for TSA Of course. Voting the other way would have been “Islamophobic.” Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/174-house-dems-convicted-terrorists-must-not-be-robert-spencer/

As old Joe Biden would say, Look, Fat, look, here’s the deal: I’ve been warning for years that it would sooner or later become “Islamophobic” to offer even the mildest opposition to jihad violence, and that the “Islamophobia” mongers would become increasingly open about their support for jihad terrorists, and here we are. On Thursday, 174 Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against an amendment to the Rights for Transportation Security Officers Act that would prevent the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from hiring convicted terrorists.

Yes, you read that right: if these House Democrats had gotten their way, on your next flight, you could have gotten a pat-down from a TSA agent who previously conspired to down the airplane you were planning to fly on. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) explained that the amendment “was pulled back by leadership because the socialist wing of the party did not want to have that amendment go forward on this bill. When it was offered, overwhelmingly the majority of the House would like to see the TSA not hire terrorists or those who have been convicted of sexual misconduct with minors and others. But the socialist wing of the party, that controls now the Democratic Party, said that that could not be offered.”

Allahu akbar, as these prospective TSA employees might have said, the whole thing exploded in their faces: enough Republicans and renegade Democrats votes for the amendment to pass it. But among the luminaries who thought it so important to avoid even the appearance of “Islamophobia” that they opposed an amendment barring terrorists from pawing through your belongings as you made your way through security were the infamous “Squad,” Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D, Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), along with the supposedly sane and responsible House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.).

Which Virus Is More Dangerous? Hint: it’s not the one the media is hyping. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/which-virus-more-dangerous-bruce-thornton/

The two big stories these days are the COVID-19 outbreak and the Democrat presidential primaries. The former is filled with the media’s apocalyptic hysteria about a disease that for now is less deadly than the yearly flu. The latter’s drama comes from the DNC’s and Democrat big donors’ success in neutralizing Bernie Sanders’ candidacy and all but ensuring that an addled mediocrity ends up being the Dems’ presidential candidate in November.

The Democrat primaries, however, are in large part a manifestation of the political virus that has infected the body politic for over three years, and that in the long run is more dangerous than the coronavirus: COVEFE-16, popularly known as Trump Derangement Syndrome. The coronavirus will eventually be contained, as previous viral outbreaks have been over the last few decades. TDS, on the other hand, may pave the way for the Dems’ control of the government come November. Such an outcome will mark a quantitative leap in the century-long dismantling of the Constitutional order that defends our political freedom.

The two diseases have converged in the NeverTrumpers’ attempts to blame the coronavirus on President Trump. A Politico headline sums it up: “Trump’s Mismanagement Helped Fuel Coronavirus Crisis.” A common sense response like barring travelers from China, ground zero of the outbreak, is called “xenophobia” and “racism.” Delays in getting test-kits available are laid at Trump’s feet, as though he directly manages their manufacture and distribution. Trump’s efforts to tamp down the panic are called callous indifference, though we all know if he’d been more urgent about the dangers, the media would have faulted him for stoking a panic.

As usual, all these criticisms never address the important caveat: Compared to what?

How about considering Barack Obama’s response to the 2009 swine flu outbreak? Journalist James Lileks has done so on his blog The Bleat. One critical difference is how long it took each president to declare the outbreak a national emergency: Trump a month after the outbreak was announced, Obama after four months, when the toll in the U.S. had reached 1000 dead (32 have died in the U.S. of the coronavirus, the vast majority over 70 years old). Most important, the media coverage of the swine flu––even though it was more deadly and half its victims, unlike the coronavirus, were healthy and young––was nowhere near the breathless hysteria or extent of the coverage today.

What’s the difference between pandemic, epidemic and outbreak? Rebecca S.B. Fischer Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Texas A&M University

http://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-pandemic-epidemic-and-outbreak-133048

The coronavirus is on everyone’s minds. As an epidemiologist, I find it interesting to hear people using technical terms – like quarantine or super spreader or reproductive number – that my colleagues and I use in our work every day.

But I’m also hearing newscasters and neighbors alike mixing up three important words: outbreak, epidemic and pandemic.

Simply put, the difference between these three scenarios of disease spread is a matter of scale.

Outbreak

Small, but unusual.

By tracking diseases over time and geography, epidemiologists learn to predict how many cases of an illness should normally happen within a defined period of time, place and population. An outbreak is a noticeable, often small, increase over the expected number of cases.

Imagine an unusual spike in the number of children with diarrhea at a daycare. One or two sick kids might be normal in a typical week, but if 15 children in a daycare come down with diarrhea all at once, that is an outbreak.

When a new disease emerges, outbreaks are more noticeable since the anticipated number of illnesses caused by that disease was zero. An example is the cluster of pneumonia cases that sprung up unexpectedly among market-goers in Wuhan, China. Public health officials now know the spike in pneumonia cases there constituted an outbreak of a new type of coronavirus, now named SARS-CoV-2.

As soon as local health authorities detect an outbreak, they start an investigation to determine exactly who is affected and how many have the disease. They use that information to figure out how best to contain the outbreak and prevent additional illness.

Epidemic

Bigger and spreading.

An epidemic is an outbreak over a larger geographic area. When people in places outside of Wuhan began testing positive for infection with SARS-CoV-2 (which causes the disease known as COVID-19), epidemiologists knew the outbreak was spreading, a likely sign that containment efforts were insufficient or came too late. This was not unexpected, given that no treatment or vaccine is yet available. But widespread cases of COVID-19 across China meant that the Wuhan outbreak had grown to an epidemic.

COVID-19 was first noticed in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 but quickly spread across the globe. This map shows all countries with confirmed cases on March 5, 2020. CDC