NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jonathan Turley spells out how foul the Trump indictment really is By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/jonathan_turley_spells_out_how_foul_the_trump_indictment_really_is.html

Every American’s speech is entitled to First Amendment protection. However, if the Biden administration has its way, that protection does not extend to Donald Trump. With his usual clarity and insight, law professor Jonathan Turley spells out just how foul the Trump indictment really is.

As always, when it comes to the latest Democrat “gotcha” against Trump, this one is stink and dangerous, explains Turley. Hidden behind the legal language and statutory citations is a straightforward effort to punish Trump for daring to speak his mind about the chicanery he (and half of the American voters) perceived in the 2020 election:

Trump was not charged with conspiracy to incite violence or insurrection. Rather, he was charged because he “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.”

In other words, Trump is being accused of challenging the Democrat establishment’s insistence that it won the election fair and square. Any dissenting views must not only be silenced but must be punished, both to keep Trump off the ballot and as a warning to others.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Throw All the Bums Out By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/throw_all_the_bums_out.html

I don’t think the federal government will exist in its current form much longer.  The reason is simple: if Marxist globalists get their way, then sovereign U.S. powers will continue to be unlawfully delegated to the U.N., the WHO, and other international monstrosities until some Obama-type tyrant is ruling over us all from Turtle Bay or a stately castle outside Brussels.  If freedom-minded people succeed in reining in the federal government and reimposing the Constitution’s limited delegation of powers, then the monstrosity that is already with us will radically diminish or disappear.  Either the current beast lording it over us will transform into something even more menacing, or it will be sapped of its blood-thirst for unconstitutional overreach and brought to heel.  For what it’s worth, my vote is for the Price Is Right option: the whole D.C. menagerie should just be spayed or neutered.

As we stand right now, the federal government functions as an extra-constitutional and largely illegitimate system that usurps the individual states’ respective sovereignties, infringes the American people’s personal rights, and betrays the spirit of our country’s foundations in liberty.

Our Union came into existence only because the former colonies were assured that they would maintain their freedom and independence.  Had the Articles of Confederation or their successor, the U.S. Constitution, sought to extinguish the individual states’ inherent sovereignties by replacing their discrete political powers with those of a single new nation, then no agreement to form a Union would have ever been reached.  The colonies did not fight a war for their independence from an empire only to squander their victory and become part of another empire.

Quite the contrary, the individual states maintain a political stature on par with foreign nations such as France and Spain; it is only in the specifically enumerated powers delegated to the federal government that federal authority supersedes the states’ own.  That word “delegated” is important.  The federal government’s power does not spring from thin air, but rather is derived from specifically listed authorities delegated to it from the states and the people.  The American people and the individual states are the origin of all legitimate power, and the federal government exists only so long as the people and the states continue to lend their own innate powers to breathe life into an otherwise powerless system.  Before the Civil War, the idea that an American was a citizen of the United States would have been as absurd as an American today being a citizen of the United Nations.  Americans are citizens of their respective states, and the states belong to the Union. 

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Majority of COVID Hospital Deaths Were Due to Untreated Bacterial Pneumonia By  James Lyons-Weiler, Ph.D.

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-hospital-deaths-bacterial-pneumonia/

Hospitals sticking to the strict hand-me-down, highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of institutional failure, a new study shows.

Hospital protocolists sticking to the strict hand-me-down highly profitable “COVID protocol” may have doomed a majority of admitted COVID-19 patients to death due to a perfect storm of institutional failure.

I first warned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in early 2020 that because the commercial kits did not use internal negative controls there would be arbitrarily high COVID-19 false positive rates due to the abuse of non-quantitative PCR.

The majority of “cases,” I pointed out, would be false because the test was to be used as a screening device — and when you screen with an imperfect test when prevalence is low, you end up with more false positives than negatives in the set of positives.

Knowing that people who were symptomatic for respiratory infections would be among the most tested population and that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s medical approach to COVID-19 was to tell people to go home and get as sick as possible, it was readily clear that people would be dying due to lack of treatment for treatable conditions, like bacterial pneumonia and fungal infections in the lung.

Now a study from the National Institutes of Health-funded researchers in Chicago has found that unresolved respiratory infections — not necessarily those involved in SARS-CoV-2 — were present in people who failed to “respond” to mechanical ventilation.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Second Thoughts on ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ The American Academy of Pediatrics orders a scientific review. Will it be conducted honestly? By Leor Sapir

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/second-thoughts-on-gender-affirming-care-american-academy-pediatrics-doctors-review-medicine-a7173276?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

The American Academy of Pediatrics said last week that it will commission a systematic review of the evidence for pediatric sex-trait modification, known euphemistically as “gender-affirming care.” This marks a turning point in the battle over the controversial medical protocol. To those who favor evidence-based rather than eminence-based medicine, it is a step in the right direction.

But it is a small step. Two key questions: Will the systematic review follow a transparent, impartial scientific process? And what should the AAP do in the meantime?

In explaining the decision to commission a systematic review, the AAP’s CEO, Mark Del Monte, said that the academy’s board “has confidence that the existing evidence is such that the current policy is appropriate. At the same time, the board recognized that additional detail would be helpful here.”

If the AAP’s position is that it is “confident” the systematic review will vindicate its position and merely add “additional detail,” that raises suspicions about the honesty and independence of the process and shows the need for strong guardrails against AAP influence over the inquiry.

The AAP is, first and foremost, a trade union. “Professional medical association” is a less apt description than “association of medical professionals.” Teachers unions care about education but give their own and their members’ interests priority over those of students. So too the AAP has strong incentives to defend its own interests and those of member doctors—especially those who have publicly endorsed or facilitated sex-trait modification—even when that is harmful to patients.

The AAP and prominent members have consistently assured policy makers and judges that sex-trait modification is safe and effective and based on strong science. Insurance companies have based their coverage decisions on these claims. Democrats have used them to cast opponents as bigots. The Biden administration regularly cites the AAP in its efforts to guarantee minors unfettered access to hormonal drugs and life-altering surgery. Parents have accepted AAP claims and agreed to allow doctors to disrupt their children’s natural puberty, flood their bodies with synthetic hormones, and amputate their healthy breasts.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald : Conservative Donors Wake Up!

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/conservative-donors-wake-up

The Supreme Court struck a symbolic blow to Harvard University this June by declaring its racial admissions preferences illegal. It remains to be seen what stratagems Harvard will use to try to continue engineering racial diversity. One thing is certain, however: the university will pay no price in reputation or in philanthropic support for the Court’s rebuke.

To understand just how confident Harvard can be in its irresistible appeal to donors, consider one of its recent windfalls. In April 2023, hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin bestowed $300 million on the university, close to the largest single donation in the institution’s history. Griffin’s cumulative giving to the school now totals over $500 million, spread between the education, law, and business schools, as well as other entities. In exchange for this latest gift, Harvard renamed its graduate division the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Business as usual, you may think; another billionaire plowing treasure into an institution whose values are, at best, in tension with American traditions and, at worst, antithetical to them. But Griffin is not your usual high-value donor—not a George Soros, Bill Gates, or David Geffen, say. He is a conservative.

Griffin believes that the United States still offers the American dream—opportunity, free markets, and individual freedom. He has called the U.S. Constitution a “sacred document.” (In 2021, he purchased an original copy for $43 million, to make that founding text widely available for “all Americans and visitors to view and appreciate.”) Griffin supports law enforcement. He opposes identity politics.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Canceling Skeptical Scientists Is the Real ‘Climate Crisis’ By Tom Harris

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/tom-harris/2023/08/05/canceling-skeptical-scientists-is-the-real-climate-crisis-n1716434

“There is no real climate crisis.”

That statement, as well as others against the mainstream climate change narrative of impending doom, led to the cancellation of a speech that was to be given by Nobel Prize laureate Dr. John Clauser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The censorship has been covered in media worldwide and, besides giving the IMF a huge black eye, is leading many to wonder what has gone wrong with climate science that such a prominent expert would be canceled merely for disagreeing with a scientific hypothesis. Let’s dig into this important news story.

Dr. Clauser is an experimental and theoretical physicist and was the joint recipient of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the foundations of quantum mechanics in the 1970s. He is now on the board of directors at the CO2 Coalition based in Arlington, Va. Dr. William Happer, chair of the board at the CO2 Coalition, said that “His [Dr. Clauser’s] studies of the science of climate provide strong evidence that there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world.”

Dr. Clauser was scheduled to speak to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office last week under the title: “Let’s talk — How much can we trust IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] climate predictions?” Because the answer Dr. Clauser was obviously going to give was “not much” and because of his other public statements criticizing the models relied upon by the IPCC, someone inside the IMF must have hit the roof. The CO2 coalition reported:

According to an email he received last evening, the Director of the Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, Pablo Moreno, had read the flyer for John’s July 25 zoom talk and summarily and immediately canceled the talk. Technically, it was “postponed.”

In 2021, Dr. Clauser criticized granting of the Nobel Prize for the development of computer models that predicted global warming. These climate models have been shown to be inaccurate and do not take into account the significant feedback of clouds in the climate system.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When Portland Died A city crumbles under a wave of anarchy and crime. by Michael A. Letts

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/when-portland-died/

For several years, Portland was the pinnacle of artistic community. Its oddball style appealed to many and drew thousands to the city. There was even a comedy series, Portlandia, that celebrated its diversity.

But…those days are gone. And you can blame anyone that supported the “defund the police” campaign.

A new report from Fox News reveals that the city, which was one the “crown jewel of the West Coast,” has now fallen into hard times, mainly due to rising crime within the communities.

In fact, police data shows that crime has dramatically increased over that of other states – including Chicago and New York.

Speaking with Fox News, Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton explained, “Each area has different challenges, but what we’re seeing in the metro area is absolutely rising crime.”

Spread across Multnomah County, Washington County and Clackamas County, the crime has reached astronomical levels, forcing both citizens and businesses to flee elsewhere.

“The increases that we’re seeing are nothing like the increases that we’re seeing in our neighbors,” Barton explained.

“What’s happening is with our de-carceration and elimination of bail culture, we’ve got all these people running around,” Kristin Olson, a trial attorney and host of the Rational in Portland podcast, added. “And it’s really scary because we also have this anti-police culture.”

So how did it come to this? It’s simple – Portland succumbed to those rioters that believed defunding the police would be the answer.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

39% Describe Trump Charges As ‘Exaggerated’ Or ‘Harassment’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/07/39-describe-trump-charges-as-exaggerated-or-harassment-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite three criminal indictments, the threat of hundreds of years of prison-time and an unprecedented media assault on his character and reputation, former President Donald Trump has maintained his head-to-head lead in polls against President Joe Biden. How is that possible? A significant number of Americans simply don’t believe the charges are valid, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

For this month’s online national poll, taken August 2-4 of 1,369 adults, we asked the following:

“Former President Trump is facing more than 40 federal charges in connection with the Mar-a-Lago classified records case and the investigation into the protests in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021. In total, these charges could amount to hundreds of years in prison. What best describes how you feel about these charges?”

We then provided four possible responses:

“The charges seem legitimate and should be pursued.”
“The charges are political harassment by the Biden administration to keep Trump from running for re-election in 2024.”
“The charges are exaggerated, but even if some are true, I will still vote for Trump in 2024.”
“Not sure.”

Given the massive media exposure to the multiple legal actions against former President and current candidate Trump, it’s probably no great shock that a slight majority of 51% responded that the “charges seem legitimate and should be pursued.” The poll’s margin of error is +/-2.7 percentage points.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran, Russia Evade Sanctions; Biden Administration ‘Funding Both Sides of Ukraine War’ by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19867/iran-russia-evade-sanctions

The Biden Administration also tried to deny that it had issued another waiver to Iraq to pay $500 million to the Iranian regime. According to a report by the Free Beacon, the waiver was issued “a day after Biden administration officials denied Iran’s claims that the United States had paved the way for Tehran to receive the $500 million.”

The regime will most likely use the funds to further arm and assist Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, to brutalize its own citizens, to undermine US national security interests, to fund its terrorist and militia groups across the Middle East and to expand more deeply into Latin America.

“Of course the Biden administration lied that they wouldn’t waive sanctions on Iran just days before they did so. They know that by allowing money to pour into Iran, they are not only endangering the safety and security of Americans but also undermining everything they claim to believe about defeating Putin. They say that Iran is a terror sponsor and Russia’s top military backer, but appeasing Iran and getting back into a nuclear deal with the Ayatollah is more important to them. They are funding both sides of the Ukraine war.” — Senator Ted Cruz, Free Beacon, March 24, 2023.

Russia is learning from Iran on how to evade sanctions as well…. Examples include: “the switching of ownership of companies and properties to family members or affiliates, the use of trading companies to source foreign exchange….”

Russia and Iran have signed an agreement to build a sanction-proof $1.7 billion intercontinental rail system for global trade in an apparent effort to compete with the Suez Canal. To bypass sanctions, Iran and Russia in February 2023 also signed an agreement to integrate their banking systems.

Iran recently joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), headed up by Russia and China. The SCO will allow the mullahs to further increase their trade and revenues in spite of sanctions.

Last year, the Biden Administration issued a waiver that had been rescinded by the Trump Administration, permitting companies from Europe, Russia and China to advance work in Iran’s nuclear sites. This was most likely done in the hope of reviving the nuclear deal…

Only because of the Biden administration’s weak leadership, policies of appeasement and reluctance to seriously enforce sanctions have Russia and Iran been able to create so much devastation at such an unprecedented level.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

China and Russia Eye Alaska A joint naval patrol off the Aleutians is a warning and a test for the U.S.

Posted By on August 7th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-and-russia-eye-alaska-aleutian-naval-ships-sullivan-a652c8b0?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Americans who think the next major war won’t touch American territory might want to take note of the news that China and Russia conducted a joint naval operation last week near the coast of Alaska.

U.S. officials said 11 ships participated in the patrol near the Aleutian islands. It was the largest such operation analysts can recall and follows a smaller one in September 2022. The joint patrol underscores the cooperation between the two countries, which is extending to military operations beyond Beijing’s help for Moscow in Ukraine. (See Seth Cropsey nearby.)

The U.S. responded with dispatch, sending four destroyers and reconnaissance aircraft to shadow the foreign warships. That’s an improvement from the September episode, when a tepid U.S. response was criticized by Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan.

A spokesman for U.S. Northern Command said the Sino-Russian patrol wasn’t perceived as a threat, but one day soon it could be. In the new era of great power competition, Russia, China and Iran are building an axis to challenge U.S. power. The naval patrol is best understood as a warning that U.S. territory isn’t safe, as well as a test of how the U.S. will respond.

The world is getting more dangerous, and a complacent U.S. political class isn’t educating the public about the growing threats.