A ‘Much Better and More Trusted’ CDC? Americans need more answers about those “dark days of the pandemic.” By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/a-much-better-and-more-trusted-cdc/

“The end of the COVID-19 public health emergency marks a tremendous transition for our country, for public health, and in my tenure as CDC Director,” proclaimed Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week. The CDC boss is stepping down from the job, which she took “with the goal of leaving behind the dark days of the pandemic and moving CDC—and public health—forward into a much better and more trusted place.”

Before they place more trust in an allegedly better CDC, embattled Americans might review events that took place on Walensky’s watch, including the sudden departure of a key CDC figure. 

In April 2021, the CDC reassigned Dr. Nancy Messonnier, longtime director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). In a May 7, 2021, White House briefing, Walensky suddenly announced that Messonnier would be stepping down. 

“Dr. Messonnier has been a true hero,” Walensky told reporters. “And through her career, in terms of public health, she’s been a steward of public health for the nation. Over this pandemic and through a many-decade career, she’s made significant contributions, and she leaves behind a strong, strong force of leadership and courage in all that she’s done.”

Walensky did not explain why, exactly, Messonnier was leaving the CDC and did not detail any of the “significant contributions” the NCIRD director had made. That invites a review of what the “true hero” Messonnier managed to accomplish in those “dark days of the pandemic.”

In November 2020, Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board called for Messonnier to take a central role in briefings on the pandemic as a way to elevate science and restore public trust in the Centers for Disease Control. The chosen messenger got right to it. 

In a CDC telebriefing on January 17, 2020, Messonnier mentioned “the outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan City, China, which has been identified as being caused by a novel coronavirus.” It was “a serious situation,” and the CDC official cautioned about travel to and from Wuhan. 

In a January 24 briefing, Messonnier said “we expect to find more cases of novel coronavirus in the United States associated with the ongoing and expanding outbreak in Wuhan, China.”  Sarah Owermohle of Politico wanted to know “what kind of dialogue are you guys are having with Chinese health authorities, and “if there is any inkling” of the origin of the novel virus.

J6 Jackals Circle Trump The verdicts and rhetoric surrounding J6 trials are leading to one goal: the arrest and prosecution of Donald Trump. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/08/j6-jackals-circle-trump/

In 2002, David Frum, chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, coined the phrase “axis of evil” to describe the despotic regimes of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq during the nascent stages of the global war on terror.

Today, Frum is warning the country about a different axis of evil that he believes similarly threatens the security of America and perhaps even the world: Donald Trump, the Oath Keepers, and the Proud Boys.

“One after another, the foot soldiers of the January 6 attack on Congress are sentenced to prison terms, which for many will mean the lifelong loss of political rights,” Frum tweeted on May 8 in faux concern for the railroaded defendants. “Yet the commanders who plotted and ordered the attack are escaping with impunity—even running for high office.”

Frum, who hasn’t lost his touch as he’s transitioned over the past two decades from a neoconservative to a full-blown Marxist, was referring to the recent convictions of members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Last Thursday, a Washington, D.C., jury found four Proud Boys guilty of seditious conspiracy, a post-Civil War statute nearly synonymous with treason; six Oath Keepers also have been convicted of the same charge for their participation in the events of January 6. Individuals tied to the groups have pleaded guilty to that count or been convicted of other conspiracy and obstruction felonies.

Now, none of these so-called “foot soldiers” possessed nuclear material or starved millions of their countrymen or harbored foreign terror cells bent on the annihilation of the United States. To the contrary, several defendants associated with both groups fought in the very same wars orchestrated by Frum and his former boss. For example, Joseph Biggs, a Proud Boy convicted last week of seditious conspiracy and other offenses, is a Purple Heart recipient who was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s.

But in Frum’s tiny, vindictive mind, men like Biggs—who brought no weapons to the Capitol and did not assault police on January 6—are comparable to, perhaps worse than, al-Qaeda and ISIS. 

After all, Osama bin Laden never expressed loyalty to the Bad Orange Man!

John Kerry ‘finds’ his Vietnam War medals, pops them onto his suit at the U.K. coronation By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/john_kerry_finds_his_vietnam_war_medals_pops_them_onto_his_suit_at_the_uk_coronation.html

Lurch makes a fool of himself in the pageantry of Britain.

In today’s ridiculous news, I present this picture:

Kerry is famous for tossing his Vietnam war medals over a fence, or at least, saying he did, before he later said it was just his ribbons, and then later still saying it some other guy’s medals. 

Here’s the New York Post report from 2004:

Presumed Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry said in an interview more than 30 years ago that he threw away some of his Vietnam combat medals – contradicting statements he has made as a candidate, it was reported yesterday.

“I gave back, I can’t remember, six, seven, eight, nine medals,” Kerry said in an interview with WRC-TV, a Washington, D.C., station on Nov. 6, 1971, ABC News reported. Kerry previously had told the network that stories about him tossing medals were a “myth.”

In the 1971 interview, for a program called “Viewpoints,” Kerry – who had not yet been elected to the Senate – said that war veterans who threw away their medals “decided to give them back to their country.”

When asked if he disposed of his Bronze Star, Silver Star and three Purple Hearts received as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam, he replied, “Well, and above that. [I] gave back the others.”

Earlier this year, Kerry was asked by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, if he regretted throwing his medals away, and responded, “There was no regret,” but he added, “I threw away my ribbons, not my medals.”

…and this…

But in 1984, he told the Globe he still had his own medals but had tossed away another soldiers’ medal.

The FBI Was Created by Napoleon’s Grandnephew History takes some odd twists and turns. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-fbi-was-created-by-napoleons-grandnephew/

History takes some odd twists and turns.

This particular odd twist began when Napoleon tried to build a dynasty out of less-than-ideal stock. His brother Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte lacked his talent for winning battles, running a country or doing much of anything. After disgracing himself during a naval command, he fled to America and married an heiress.

Jerome had a son, but remained a spineless weasel. After trying and failing to talk Napoleon into accepting his wife, he agreed to divorce her and marry royalty. Jerome failed miserably as a prince, wasted money, lost battles and was a disaster. Meanwhile, his son, also Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, grew up in America. Jerome had two sons, Jerome II and Charles ‘Charlie’ Joseph Bonaparte. Both men made a better show of the family name than their absent deadbeat prince of a dad had. Jerome II became a successful fighting man while Charlie wound up in Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet as Attorney General Charlie Bonaparte or Charle the Crook Chaser.

Charlie Bonaparte created the Bureau of Investigation which would later become the FBI.

Napoleon’s grandnephew created the FBI originally to fight leftist anarchist terrorists. As organized crime took off, the FBI’s mission shifted more to what we know it as today, combating interstate crime.

And for those who accuse the Bureau of overreach, it was created by a Bonaparte.

Iran Seizes More Tankers in Persian Gulf The Islamic Republic’s actions are a slap in the face to the Biden regime. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-seizes-more-tankers-in-persian-gulf/

Last Wednesday we learned that the Iranian regime had seized a second oil tanker recently in the Persian Gulf, forcing it to dock at an Iranian port under orders from the regime’s “judiciary.”

It was seized by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Go-fast boats in the Strait of Hormuz. This remains the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, according to the US Energy Information Administration, where roughly 20% of the world’s oil transits every day.

The Pentagon subsequently informed us that these two incidents were just the latest of fifteen cases since Biden came to the White House where Iran has threatened or attacked international shipping in the Persian Gulf region.

These kind of attacks are unacceptable. The Iranians know that, and I guarantee you our enemies and adversaries know that. And yet the Iranians act with impunity. Why?

For starters, they know the current U.S. President. Biden has been taking money and supporting pro-Tehran regime lobbyists since at least 2002, when a group of Tehran-supporters threw a fund-raiser for him in California that brought in $30,000.

From then on, Biden became a reliable vote (along with Senator Chuck Hagel) when it came to opposing sanctions on Iran. He railed against President George W. Bush and his “axis of evil” because it included the Iranian regime.

Since becoming president, he has tried hard to re-invigorate the bad Iran nuclear deal, a deal that not only gave Iran a date certain to become a nuclear weapons state with impunity, but lifted all sanctions on the regime’s ballistic missile programs as well.

Just think how many people in Israel, Ukraine, Yemen, and Iraq – including US soldiers and contractors – have been victims of those missiles since 2015.

Turkey’s Hizbullah Terrorists: Erdoğan’s New Ally by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19615/turkey-hizbullah-terrorists

Turkey’s Hizbullah is not to be confused with the Lebanese Shia terror group Hezbollah, although their name has the same meaning in Arabic: The Party of God.

Operating primarily in Batman Province, Hizbullah murdered 188 people in and around the mainly Kurdish city of Batman. The victims included 32 shot in the neck: men for drinking alcohol and women for wearing mini-skirts.

A prominent feminist Islamist, Konca Kuriş, was abducted by Hizbullah and tortured for 35 days before she was murdered. Her Islamism was fine; her feminism was not.

The international community would do well to understand that Kurds, US allies in northern Iraq and Syria, are not monolithic. Secular Kurds are allies. But there are also Islamist Kurds who support Erdoğan.

To win, Erdoğan would ally with radical Islamists: certified terrorists.

If Erdoğan does win on May 14, there will be, for the first time, radical Islamist terrorists in the Turkish parliament. Hizbullah terrorists — responsible for the torture and deaths of hundreds of people in ISIS-style executions — in the parliament of a NATO member state?! This potential outcome is the biggest talk among Western diplomats in Ankara. Most are shocked. They should not be. It is vintage Erdoğan.

Turkey’s Hizbullah is not to be confused with the Lebanese Shia terror group Hezbollah, although their name has the same meaning in Arabic: The Party of God. Turkey’s Hizbullah is radically Sunni and pro-Kurdish.

Principal Beats Principle in the World Order The new communists appeal to the world’s poor by promising to make them rich. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/principal-beats-principle-in-the-world-order-global-south-china-growth-human-rights-ee2cfbe9?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

Sunday’s Arab League vote to readmit the blood-stained Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad should be a wake-up call for Washington. Longtime American allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have flipped from backing the U.S.-led effort to isolate and ultimately overthrow Mr. Assad to supporting the Sino-Russian goal of reintegrating him into the regional order.

Many factors go into such decisions, but the Arab League move is part of a wider trend that Washington can’t afford to ignore. It isn’t only nondemocratic countries like the Gulf Arab states tilting toward Russia and China these days. Democracies like Brazil and South Africa are rejecting American pleas to rally behind democratic Ukraine against autocratic Russia. Across the so-called Global South, few countries, democratic or not, are rushing to enlist in President Biden’s anti-autocracy crusade.

Winning friends and influencing people in the Global South was a challenge for American strategists during the Cold War. It will be more difficult this time around. If Washington policy makers and the broader foreign-policy community don’t understand the new challenge, American diplomacy will face setbacks and frustrations.

Chinese communists today aren’t only better at economics than Mao and the Soviet chowderheads; they are also smarter politically. The old communists wanted to conquer the world by alliances with the underdogs and the poor. Today they align with the rich.

Reparations Derangement Syndrome

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/09/reparations-derangement-syndrome/

A panel in California, where rotten public policy ideas metastasize like a fungus growing in dark, slimy conditions, has approved paying reparations to descendants of slaves. It is impossible to overstate just how insane this is.

The reparations task force, appointed by Boy Gov. Gavin Newsom, voted Saturday to recommend the state pay out as much as $800 billion to the descendants of enslaved or free black people who were in the U.S. by the end of the 19th century. That’s 2.5 times the size of California’s annual budget. Recipients could rake in as much as $1.2 million each.

Or more. Much more. Because San Francisco’s reparations advisory committee has recommended the city’s qualified African American residents be given a $5 million lump sum.

The committee also proposed “the elimination of credit card debt, car and student loans; a string of tax breaks; and 250 years of special benefits for African Americans such as a  guaranteed income of $97,000 a year (adjusted for inflation); and the ability to buy homes for $1,” says Rowena Itchon of the Pacific Research Institute.

The cost of this largess, says the Hoover Institution’s Lee Ohanian, will be “​​on a per-household basis … nearly $600,000 per non–African American San Francisco household.”

Let’s not pretend this is about justice, fairness and decency. It’s a shakedown – aided and abetted by rich, white, guilt-ridden, virtue-signaling progressives – that not even Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton could have envisioned a decade ago.

The case against reparations is irrefutable. Or would be in a sane world, which we no longer live in.

Despite the lunacy that has a grip on our politics, we will lay out the arguments.

First, no taxpayer in California or the U.S. was alive when slavery was allowed in this country, and none of those who were enslaved are alive either. Anyone who doesn’t think this is irrelevant is neither a clear nor honest thinker.

Second, we go to Andreas Koureas of The Spectator, who brings up an unpopular but salient point: “Ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races.” Consequently, nearly every human on the planet has “an ancestral link to the slave trade.” 

Palestinians: More Human Rights Violations No One Talks About by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19639/palestinians-human-rights

The failure [to report the deaths of two men in Hamas custody] underscores what appears their total lack of concern for the human rights of Palestinians living under the rule of Hamas….

The media seem more worried about the human rights of Palestinian terrorists than the rights of victims of Palestinian terrorists.

Adnan [the leader of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad] was neither tortured nor mistreated in Israeli prison.

The stories of the two Palestinian men who died in Hamas custody are vastly different from that of Adnan. Al-Sufi’s family insist he died of torture while in Hamas custody.

Foreign journalists did not visit, or even try to contact, the families of the two men held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The UN and human rights organizations — who expressed so much concern over the death of the hunger striker in an Israeli prison — have yet to comment on the suspicious deaths of the two Palestinians in Hamas detention in the Gaza Strip, which could constitute crimes against humanity.

No one cares about the two men who died in Hamas custody, apparently because Israel is not associated with their deaths. Had Al-Sufi and Al-Louh died in an Israeli prison, they would have made headlines in The New York Times, the BBC and CNN.

The newspapers and media organizations turning a blind eye to human rights violations committed by Hamas against Palestinians are implying, through their failure to cover these suspicious deaths, that there is nothing newsworthy about Palestinians reportedly being tortured to death in Palestinian prisons.

The media’s indifference to these deaths appears the result of the “racism of low expectations.”

“They treat Muslims like monkeys in a zoo,” stated Egyptian scholar Hamed Abdel Samad. It is as if journalists and so-called human rights groups assume that Muslims are such savages that it would be laughable even to expect civilized behavior from them; so why report it at all?

Some of these “correspondents” appear so blinded by their bigotry that, under the banner of being “pro-Palestinian,” they are ready to give Hamas a free pass to arrest, torture and kill as many of their fellow-Palestinians they wish.

There is much damning evidence of anti-Israel bias in the mainstream media and so-called human rights organizations in the West.

Those who ignore human rights violations committed by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority against Palestinians do a massive disservice to the Palestinians whom they claim to support, but who remain horribly mistreated by their own leaders.

The death on May 1 in an Israeli prison of Khader Adnan, a senior member of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization, has received worldwide coverage in major media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, and The New York Times.

Malicious Attacks on Veterans’ Benefits by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19638/veterans-benefits

There is something uniquely despicable about a Democratic strategy in Congress that would turn the urgent need to cut waste in President Joe Biden’s proposed $6 trillion dollar budget into a political weapon by accusing the Republicans — falsely — of seeking to cut veterans’ benefits.

Let us start with the premise that the federal budget has considerable pork — billions, in fact. Let us also assume that the creeping inflation currently harming the hard-working middle class of America lies at the feet of those massive federal programs that printed billions of dollars in an ill-advised strategy to prop up the economy. As more dollars are printed, their buying power goes down – so you will need to keep paying out more dollars to buy the same item – as with food or to gas up the car.

Accordingly, House Republicans are rightly insisting that before we address the debt ceiling by its June 1st deadline, it is urgent to tackle the hard issue of where and how to contain out-of-control federal spending. The GOP leadership recognizes that, as at home, massive spending, unsupported by a balanced budget, can literally put a nation’s future at risk. Other nations have failed when they mismanaged their books — and America is not immune from economic collapse due to an unsupportable national debt with an unsustainable mushrooming service on the debt.

However, in a shameless display of partisan baiting, Democrats say that the Republicans’ “Limit, Save, Grow Act to Rein in Wasteful Spending and Grow the Economy,” which passed the House last week, will harm key programs and services at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a department that barely serves our veterans even now.