China’s Lies Part 3: More Songs About Viral Labs And Propaganda

April 16th, 2020

Little did I know that when I started blogging about all China’s that I was taking on a second* job.

  • With the “wet market” transmission idea untenable, the new “official” line on the origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus transmission is that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but was a natural virus they were studying that got out:

    There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China’s government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.

    This may be the “costliest government coverup of all time,” one of the sources said.

    The sources believe the initial transmission of the virus was bat-to-human, and that “patient zero” worked at the laboratory, then went into the population in Wuhan.

    The “increasing confidence” comes from classified and open-source documents and evidence, the sources said. Fox News has requested to see the evidence directly.

    (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)

  • Promoters of this new line include the Washington Post, which says that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was craptacular:

    Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

    In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

    What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington. The cables warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help. The first cable, which I obtained, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

    “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and other details of the story.)

    The Chinese researchers at WIV were receiving assistance from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch and other U.S. organizations, but the Chinese requested additional help. The cables argued that the United States should give the Wuhan lab further support, mainly because its research on bat coronaviruses was important but also dangerous.

    As the cable noted, the U.S. visitors met with Shi Zhengli, the head of the research project, who had been publishing studies related to bat coronaviruses for many years. In November 2017, just before the U.S. officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

    There’s that name again.

  • Jim Geraghty also notes that safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was not the best:

    Two facilities in the city of Wuhan were researching coronaviruses in bats — the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology is China’s first biocontainment level-4 facility, inaugurated in 2015. It is still the country’s only one.

    Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, told the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists last month that “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”

    Snip.

    in February 2019, Lynn Klotz, a senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, laid out a report suggesting that human errors at these sorts of labs not only had occurred, but occurred unnervingly frequently.

    Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities.

    Such releases are fairly likely over time, as there are at least 14 labs (mostly in Asia) now carrying out this research. Whatever release probability the world is gambling with, it is clearly far too high a risk to human lives. Mammal-transmissible bird flu research poses a real danger of a worldwide pandemic that could kill human beings on a vast scale.

    Human error is the main cause of potential exposures of lab workers to pathogens. Statistical data from two sources show that human error was the cause of, according to my research, 67 percent and 79.3 percent of incidents leading to potential exposures in BSL3 labs. These percentages come from analysis of years of incident data from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) and from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

    Klotz described needle sticks and other through the skin exposures from sharp objects; dropped containers or spills and splashes of liquids containing pathogens; bites or scratches from infected animals; pathogens manipulated outside of a biosafety cabinet or other equipment designed to protect exposures to infectious aerosols; failure to follow safety procedures; failure or problems with personal protective equipment; mechanical or equipment failure; and failure to properly inactivate pathogens before transferring them to a lower biosafety level lab for further research. There are plenty of real-life examples for every medical menace in every Robin Cook novel. And this is separate from the other frightening examples of lab accidents laid out last week.

  • Speaking of Geraghty, he also notes more evidence leading back to a Chinese virology lab.

    The bat researcher that Xiao’s report refers to is virologist Tian Junhua, who works at the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control. In 2004, the World Health Organization determined that an outbreak of the SARS virus had been caused by two separate leaks at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. The Chinese government said that the leaks were a result of “negligence” and the responsible officials had been punished.

    “Negligence,” yeah. Funny how China managed to unleash two plagues on the world from its virus research labs through “negligence.” The piece also mentions another Chinese bat researcher:

    In 2017, the Chinese state-owned Shanghai Media Group made a seven-minute documentary about Tian Junhua, entitled “Youth in the Wild: Invisible Defender.” Videographers followed Tian Junhua as he traveled deep into caves to collect bats. “Among all known creatures, the bats are rich with various viruses inside,” he says in Chinese. “You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases, like rabies virus, SARS, and Ebola. Accordingly, the caves frequented by bats became our main battlefields.” He emphasizes, “bats usually live in caves humans can hardly reach. Only in these places can we find the most ideal virus vector samples.”

    One of his last statements on the video is: “In the past ten-plus years, we have visited every corner of Hubei Province. We explored dozens of undeveloped caves and studied more than 300 types of virus vectors. But I do hope these virus samples will only be preserved for scientific research and will never be used in real life. Because humans need not only the vaccines, but also the protection from the nature.”

    The description of Tian Junhua’s self-isolation came from a May 2017 report by Xinhua News Agency, repeated by the Chinese news site JQKNews.com:

    The environment for collecting bat samples is extremely bad. There is a stench in the bat cave. Bats carry a large number of viruses in their bodies. If they are not careful, they are at risk of infection. But Tian Junhua is not afraid to go to the mountain with his wife to catch Batman.[SIC – LP]

    Tian Junhua summed up the experience that the most bats can be caught by using the sky cannon and pulling the net. But in the process of operation, Tian Junhua forgot to take protective measures. Bat urine dripped on him like raindrops from the top. If he was infected, he could not find any medicine. It was written in the report.

    The wings of bats carry sharp claws. When the big bats are caught by bat tools, they can easily spray blood. Several times bat blood was sprayed directly on Tians skin, but he didn’t flinch at all. After returning home, Tian Junhua took the initiative to isolate for half a month. As long as the incubation period of 14 days does not occur, he will be lucky to escape, the report said.

    Bat urine and blood can carry viruses. How likely is it that bat urine or blood got onto a researcher at either Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Alternatively, what are the odds that some sort of medical waste or other material from the bats was not properly disposed of, and that was the initial transmission vector to a human being?

    Virologists have been vehemently skeptical of the theory that COVID-19 was engineered or deliberately constructed in a laboratory; the director of the National Institutes of Health has written that recent genomic research “debunks such claims by providing scientific evidence that this novel coronavirus arose naturally.” And none of the above is definitive proof that COVID-19 originated from a bat at either the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Definitive proof would require much broader access to information about what happened in those facilities in the time period before the epidemic in the city.

    But it is a remarkable coincidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was researching Ebola and SARS-associated coronaviruses in bats before the pandemic outbreak, and that in the month when Wuhan doctors were treating the first patients of COVID-19, the institute announced in a hiring notice that “a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.” And the fact that the Chinese government spent six weeks insisting that COVID-19 could not be spread from person to person means that its denials about Wuhan laboratories cannot be accepted without independent verification.

  • And all these exciting bat-catching activities mentioned above? Would you believe that U.S. taxpayers funded some of it?
  • The UK’s choronavirus task force thinks that the biolab origin theory is credible.
  • “Former FDA Commissioner: ‘China Was Not Truthful With the World’:

    The former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said on Sunday that China misled the world about the CCP virus and that the World Health Organization should commit to creating a report on the repercussions of its obfuscation.

    “China was not truthful with the world at the outset of this. Had they been more truthful with the world, which would have enabled them to be truthful with themselves, they might have actually been able to contain this entirely and there is some growing evidence to suggest that,” Scott Gottlieb told CBS News in an April 12 interview on “Face the Nation.”

  • Yes, I’m linking to a Slashdot comment, but one that nicely summarizes all the coronavirus whistleblowers China disappeared, namely:
    • Dr. AI Fen
    • Chen Qiushi
    • Fang Bin
    • Li Zehua
    • Xu Zhiyong
    • Ren Zhiqiang
    • Dr. Li Wenliang
    • Xu Zhangrun
    • Xie Linka
  • You know that reporter that President Donald Trump asked if she was working for China? Yeah, she was working for China:

    While Phoenix TV is not wholly owned by the Chinese government, its content is widely considered to be sympathetic to Beijing.

    The Hoover Institution regards it as a “quasi-official” news outlet with links to the Chinese government’s ministry of state security.

    Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, said in a 2017 report that Phoenix TV is owned by a former Chinese military officer with close ties to Beijing officials.

  • And a second one. “[Chang Ching-Yi] responded that he was from Taiwan. While that is where he was born, he works for Shanghai Media Group, a company owned by the Chinese regime.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Of course, China is also using plain old paid advertising propaganda against President Trump as well.

    Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.

    Three official news outlets – Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times – have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.

    I’m sure those in the media who shrieked about how Russian Facebook ads were destroying democracy will speak up against China any day now… (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)

  • Indeed, our media can’t seem refrain from disseminating even obvious lies from the Chinese government:

    Even before reports on incinerators “working around the clock,” massive orders for urns, government bribes to keep mourners quiet, and total government censorship, China’s lies were obvious. Even before China concealed the outbreak, blamed the U.S. military, and expelled foreign reporters, their lies were obvious.

    Their lies were so obvious because China is an authoritarian regime that history plainly documents killing and starving millions while lying about it to this day. The press should know this, and they do know this, yet still corporate news outlets unquestioningly repeat Beijing’s line.

    Then it all got a little confusing Wednesday, when Bloomberg reported both that the United States leads China in coronavirus cases and that China is concealing cases and deaths inside the country.

    “China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country,” the latter story reads, “under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House.”

    And there it is. The news certainly checks out with what reporters could have confirmed if they’d actually been reporting this past month.

    Snip.

    Bloomberg News, notably, has a history of covering for Beijing and was allowed to keep its reporters in China when government authorities expelled The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal in March. Maybe the government was confident those reporters wouldn’t start checking in on their numbers, preferring to wait for their U.S. government sources to spoon feed it to them. No surprise. Michael Bloomberg’s fortune is deeply entangled with China (and he knows it).

    But his company is not alone. CNN uncritically repeats China’s false statistics over and over again. NBC, MSNBC, BBC, The New York Times — the list goes on, all without corrections or updates.

    The corporate media’s trumpeting of foreign propaganda is especially eager when it hurts the president they don’t like. Outlets like Vox and BuzzFeed relentlessly attack Trump for not taking the coronavirus seriously enough early enough, but rushed to edit their past coverage that had authoritatively declared coronavirus less dangerous than the common flu. Vox, The New York Times and their television peers declare the president’s use of “Wuhan coronavirus” racist, while editing and forgetting past coverage that used “Wuhan coronavirus” or explained why so many pandemics come from that country.

  • Speaking of our media, here’s a handy Twitter thread of various MSM outlets parroting the ChiCom line.
  • Twitter banned, then unbanned, Steve Bannon’s War Room : Pandemic account, without explanation. “Launched in January, Bannon’s podcast covered immense ground concerning the coronavirus – including the theory that the disease leaked from a Chinese laboratory which was experimenting with bat coronavirus; a theory Zero Hedge suggested in January which similarly earned us a permanent ban from Twitter.”

    • I swear, blogging about Chinese lies and propaganda makes me feel like I’m Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory

    *Actually more like a fifth…

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    Wuhan Coronavirus Origins Part 2: Timelines of China’s Lies

    April 15th, 2020

    The problem with blogging about China’s lies over the Wuhan Cornavirus isn’t what to include, but what to leave out. There are at least two pretty useful timelines:

  • The Center for Security Policy
  • The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

    • From the Center for Security Policy:

    November 17, 2019

    Patient Zero. Official Chinese government sources say the first case of coronavirus emerges on November 17, but is not recognized at the time. The unidentified victim is to become known as “Patient Zero.”

    December 26

    Wuhan virus detected with 87% similarity to SARS. A medical lab received samples from Wuhan hospitals “and reached a stunning conclusion as early as the morning of Dec. 26. The samples contained a new corona virus with an 87 percent similarity to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.” This account will be revealed late in January 2020 by multiple unauthorized Chinese sources.

    December 27

    Lab executives urgently brief Wuhan health officials. A day after discovering the new corona virus, “lab executives held urgent meetings to brief Wuhan health officials and hospital management,” according to a lab technician.

    Officials order labs to suppress scientific findings. Chinese genomics scientists sequence the virus and discover a resemblance to SARS, but Chinese regime officials order them to surrender or destroy the virus samples. The regime suppresses the scientific findings. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) censors delete the news report of the destruction, revealed by Caixin Global, from the Chinese internet.

    Snip.

    Late December 2019 – Early January 2020

    Authorities report no new infections or deaths. “. . . in Wuhan, local cadres were focused on a days-long Communist Party conclave that was scheduled to run from Jan. 11 to Jan. 17. During that time, the Wuhan Health Commission each day claimed there were no new infections or deaths,” the Washington Post‘s Gerry Shih, Emily Rauhala, and Lena H. Sun would later report from Beijing. (They would later be banned for their reporting.)

    Snip.

    January 8

    Infection information is suppressed. Regime officials in Wuhan suppress information that medical workers in the city had been exposed to the virus by patients they were treating, and that they, too, had become infected.

    US CDC issues alert for patients who had been to Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control in Washington issues an alert for clinicians “to be on the look-out for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan, China.”

    Snip.

    January 16

    Wuhan officials say health crisis is over, and encourage large public gatherings. Wuhan residents go to a government sponsored fair, citing government statements that the health crisis is over.

    Chinese officials encouraged hundreds of millions of people to travel over previous month. Mid-December 2019 to mid-January 2020 “was a time when Chinese officials were beginning to grasp the threat of a new contagious disease in Wuhan but did little to inform the public — even with the approach of the Lunar New Year holiday for which hundreds of millions of Chinese travel,” the Washington Post would report.

    January 24

    Still no human-to-human transmission outside China, according to WHO. Science News: “No human-to-human transmission has yet been reported outside of China, the WHO said.”

    Chinese government bans ‘group travel’ within China but allows travel to foreign countries. Beijing bans “group travel” within China but still permits travel abroad. “But in a blunder that would have far reaching consequences, China did not issue an order suspending group travel to foreign countries until three days later, on Jan. 27,” Japan’s Nikkei reports.

    February 5

    New York Times runs op-ed saying it’s safe to travel to China. The New York Times publishes an op-ed by a travel writer who objects to the notion that it is unsafe to travel to China. The piece is headlined, “Who says it’s not safe to travel to China?” (Subsequently, the op-ed does not appear on the writer’s website that contains her list of published works.)

    Chinese government urges US and others to abide by WHO policies. The US and other countries should follow WHO guidelines and not impose their own measures, China’s consul general in New York tells reporters. “‘We understand all the measures taken by the US and many other countries. But I think still we should follow the guidance from the WHO and not to issue measures stricter than that or overreact,’ Huang said, referring the World Health Organisation’s opposition to restrictions on travel and trade, despite having declared the outbreak a global emergency,” according to the South China Morning Post.

    Plus how Communist Party control made everything worse, as local officials were too terrified of doing something wrong to act for fear of receiving blame from the national party, so the truth about the outbreaks was repressed at every level until the problem was too big to ignore.

    On the American response:

    January 8

    US CDC issues alert for patients who had been to Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control in Washington issues an alert for clinicians “to be on the look-out for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan, China.”

    January 17

    US starts implementing airport health entry screening for virus ‘exported’ from Wuhan. The Centers for Disease Control announces implementation of “enhanced health screenings to detect ill travelers traveling to the United States on direct or connecting flights from Wuhan, China. This activity is in response to an outbreak in China caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (2019 nCoV), with exported cases to Thailand and Japan.”

    Plus the WHO’s repeatedly parroting the communist line, and zillions of news outlets calling it “Wuhan coronavirus” until they suddenly decided (no doubt at China’s urging) that it was racist to tell the truth.

    The Victims of Communism is less detailed on a day-by-day basis, but includes a good timeline on the WHO’s complicity in the coverup.

    The Chinese Communist Party’s deception has had a terrible human cost, with more than 100,000 global deaths and counting. Entire countries are shut down and economies are contracting, pointing to a global crisis that will likely outlive the pandemic itself. According to a study by the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton, if Beijing had acted three weeks earlier, the number of COVID-19 cases could have been reduced by 95 percent, and its geographic spread would have been severely limited—thereby preventing a pandemic.

    If you’ve got the time, both are well worth reading through.

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    Questioning The Official “Wet Market” Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus Part 1: The Video

    April 14th, 2020

    Links have been continuing to build up questioning the official “wet market” Wuhan Coronavirus origin story. This Epoch Times video presents the case that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the likely source of the virus.

  • Bats were not sold in the Huanan Seafood Market.
  • A third of the early Chinese victims had no connection to the Huanan Seafood Market.
  • If we are to believe the two experts cited, evidence from the coronavirus amino acids and protein spikes suggests an artificial origin in the original SARS completely separate from the postulated bat origin.
  • In early January, the Chinese government ordered all existing Wuhan coronavirus samples to be destroyed.
  • Prominent mention of Shi Zhengli, AKA The Bat Lady, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as previously discussed here. She’s been researching coronavirus since 2003. “From 2010 onward, the focus of Shi and her team, was redirected to identifying the capacity for coronavirus transmission across species, specifically putting the spotlight on the S [spike] protein of coronaviruses.”
  • “In November, 2015, Shi and her team at the Wuhan lab once again published a paper, this time in the British journal, Nature Medicine. They discussed the creation of a synthetic virus, a self-replicating Chimeric virus. This virus had the SARS virus as the framework, with the key S protein replaced by the one they had found in a bat coronavirus she mentioned in her 2013 paper. This new virus demonstrated a powerful ability for cross-species infection.”
  • Her next research was on primates.
  • On November 14, 2018, Shi gave a speech at a Chinese university on bat coronavirus and its cross-species infection. “reports of this event have since been deleted from the university website.”
  • As part of the Thousand Talents program, China took coronavirus samples from Canada and the United States and sent them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • ” January 2nd, an email from the Director-General of the Institute to all internal staff was circulated. The subject was “Notice regarding the strict prohibition of disclosure of any information related to the Wuhan unknown pneumonia.”
  • “February 3rd, Dr. Wu Xiaohua blew the whistle using his real name, that Shi Zhengli’s haphazard laboratory management may have led the Wuhan virus to leak from the lab. February 4th, Chairman of Duoyi, Xu Bo, blew the whistle using his real name, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was suspected of manufacturing and leaking the Wuhan virus. February 7th, top biochemical weapon expert of the People’s Liberation Army, Chen Wei, officially assumed control over Wuhan Institute of virology’s P4 laboratory.”
  • Notes the previously discussed mysterious scrubbing of alleged Patent Zero Huang Yanling from the institute’s website.
  • “February 17th, institute researcher Chen Quanjiao blew the whistle using her real name, that Director General of the institute, Wang Yanyi was suspected of leaking the virus.”
  • There’s a “Military Management Office” at the institute.
  • There follows a lot more analysis of China’s geopolitical strategy of unrestricted warfare.

    • “Every person that it kills, every person that it harms is directly attributable to the Chinese Communist Party.”

    Caveat: I’m not a virologist, and have no knowledgebase with which to evaluate the claims presented here. I also note that the video only cites two virology experts, which makes their conclusions less than iron-clad. I would also like more background on the various Chinese whistleblower assertions about the institute.

    But there’s certainly a lot of smoke here.

    Tomorrow: More analysis of the timeline

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 3 Comments »

    Say Goodbye To The Clown Car And Hello To BidenWatch!

    April 13th, 2020

    Since Bernie Sanders dropped out, Slow Joe Biden is the default Democratic Party nominee for President in 2020, despite not having yet reached the required delegate threshold to clinch the nomination.

    That means the Clown Car Update has finally come to an end. But in its place, behold the birth of BidenWatch!

    This is going to be an ongoing roundup of Biden link, tweets, videos, etc. I plan to keep this up until the election, or the DNC replaces Biden at the convention, or Biden’s brain explodes, whichever comes first.

    But before we get to the BidenWatch itself, let’s list all the declared Democratic politicians Biden defeated for the nomination.

    The List of the Vanquished

    Listed in the order they dropped out:

    1. Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda: Dropped out January 29, 2019
    2. California Representative Eric Swalwell: Dropped out July 8, 2019
    3. Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel: Dropped out August 2, 2019
    4. Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped out August 21, 2019
    5. Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton: Dropped out August 23, 2019
    6. Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper: Dropped out August 15, 2019
    7. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand: Dropped out August 29, 2019
    8. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: Dropped out September 20, 2019
    9. Ohio Representative Tim Ryan: Dropped out October 24, 2019
    10. Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke: Dropped out November 1, 2019
    11. Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: Dropped out November 20, 2019
    12. Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak: Dropped out December 1, 2019
    13. Montana Governor Steve Bullock: Dropped out December 2, 2019
    14. California Senator Kamala Harris: Dropped out December 3, 2019
    15. Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro: Dropped out January 2, 2020
    16. Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson: Dropped out January 10, 2020
    17. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker: Dropped out January 11, 2020
    18. Former Maryland Representative John Delaney: Dropped out January 31, 2020
    19. Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: Dropped out February 12, 2020
    20. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet: Dropped out February 11, 2020
    21. Venture capitalist Andrew Yang: Dropped out February 11, 2020
    22. Billionaire Tom Steyer: Dropped out February 29, 2020
    23. South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg: Dropped out March 1, 2020
    24. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar: Dropped out March 2, 2020
    25. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Dropped out March 4, 2020
    26. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren: Dropped out March 5, 2020
    27. Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: Dropped out March 19, 2020
    28. Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: Dropped out April 8, 2020

    (Doing this list as a cheat-sheet for myself, and for (as Dwight likes to say) the Historical Record.)

    Now on to BidenWatch itself!

  • “Dems Are Suddenly Fans of Due Process Now That Crazy Joe the Wonder Veep Has Been Accused.”

    Ever since Brett Kavanaugh was falsely accused of sexual assault in 2018, the Third-Wave Feminist Shrieking Harridan Brigade has been telling us we must “believe all women” who level any charges. Due process be damned, all men are guilty, and that’s that.

    Until the Biden thing.

    The same media types who have been leading the #MeToo finger-wagging for a couple of years have now adopted an “ignore this woman” approach. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that they would circle the wagons for the presumptive Democratic nominee.

  • And then NYT whitewashes their own story:

  • The New York Post calls them out for it:

    Do you recall the Times searching the Twitter feed of Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford? Or spending weeks digging up dirt that could make her seem a flake, as the Lerer-Ember story does with Reade?

    Reade is making charges about events in 1993, when she was in her 20s and Biden was 51. Ford’s claims were even older, about events in 1982, when all involved were in high school.

    Unlike Reade, Ford had no one confirming she’d told the same story at the time — indeed, everyone she cited as a witness said that nothing like the party she described had ever happened.

    Yet the Times (and ideological allies at other publications as well as in politics) played up every allegation against Kavanaugh, pumping up their apparent credibility exactly as it seeks to undermine Reade’s credibility now. Even months after he won confirmation, it ran a column presenting yet another “accusation” — without mentioning that the “accuser” didn’t remember it happening, and in fact wouldn’t even be interviewed.

    The Gray Lady is hardly alone in this hypocrisy: The actress and #MeToo leader Alyssa Milano, for example, has suddenly discovered due process now that a candidate she favors stands accused. “We have to societally change that mindset to believing women, but that does not mean at the expense of not giving men their due process and investigating situations,” Milano said in an interview. “It’s got to be fair in both directions.”

    It isn’t hard to come to the conclusion that for Republicans, it’s “guilty when accused.” Only Democrats deserve the benefit of doubt.

  • How the Wuhan Coronavirus has screwed Biden’s campaign:

    For starters, there’s money. Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee already have $225 million in the bank. That’s 17 times more than Joe Biden’s campaign has on hand now.

    The coronavirus has prohibited the kinds of back-slapping, elbow-cupping, look-them-right-in-the-eye access for solicitations that donors cherish in person. So, Biden is left to play catch-up from his Delaware mansion via time-consuming Skyping or Facetiming with small bands of rich people.

    Snip.

    Do you have any sense of exactly what a President Biden would do once he no longer had a Donald Trump to kick around?

    No, you don’t. Because all the six-term ex-senator and two-term ex-vice president has done recently is endorse whatever House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer want. Which is also what would likely happen once Nancy and Chuck had their own presidential puppet in the Oval Office.

    An incumbent of either party has a built-in fundraising advantage based on his prominence and accumulated power. The odds of incumbents winning are excellent in modern times.

    Perhaps you’ve noticed President Trump on TV daily talking about the national health crisis and anything else that crosses his mind. Perhaps you also remember the summer of 2012 when incumbent Barack Obama was assuring us that al-Qaeda was on the run just before militants sacked the Benghazi consulate and killed four Americans..

    With his built-in fundraising advantage, Obama’s campaign spent that summer on TV defining Mitt Romney as a wealthy elitist who transported the family dog on his car roof and may have caused cancer in elderly women. The under-funded Romney could not respond until his official nomination the last week of August gave him access to federal funds and general election donations. Too late.

    Come this June or July at the latest, expect to see the immense Trump campaign treasury financing a barrage of anti-Biden ads that make D-Day’s pre-invasion bombardment look like a beach picnic. Biden’s very long public record, his family’s sometimes shady shenanigans and his own unique panoply of verbal gaffes and garbled syntactical nonsense provide a target-rich environment of damaging video clips.

    Oh, look! That invisible virus just conspired to prompt Democrats to delay their national convention by five weeks to mid-August. That’s five fewer weeks of federal funding for the Biden camp to respond. With the Summer Olympics also postponed, that leaves the entire summer wide open for Trump’s team to define old Joe as, well, old, perhaps too old mentally for the demands of the commander-in-chief job.

  • “For $1,500, Joe, what year did the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 occur?” Joe: “1917?” “No. 10 seconds, Joe.” “1916?”
  • There’s rambling, and then there’s Joe Biden rambling:

    From his forthcoming TV show, Where In the World Is The End of Joe Biden’s Sentence?

  • It’s an ongoing theme:

    Here’s Sleepy Joe on health insurance.

    “We should be making it easier, not harder, to make sure, to se-, to make sense. Let me put it another way, it makes no sense.”

    May we quote you on that, Lunch Bucket Joe?

    After apparently winning the Wisconsin primary, Biden went on CNN with Fredo Cuomo to take a bow, or something, about the results:

    “But look, it’s been done. We’re gonna get the election results in about, what, another week, in another week or so after that this… I forget the date, the 13th? And, uh, I you know but I I think that uh uh you know I I if if there’s an election, was an election, if people, depending on how many showed up, I think I will have done well but who knows?”

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Mr. Consistency:

  • Biden endorsed by Georgia Democratic Representative John Lewis, who always gets described as “Civil Rights Icon” rather than “17 term congressman.” The endorsement came last week while Sanders was still in the race. From here on out I don’t think additional Democrats endorsing Biden is newsworthy.
  • Biden gets taken to the woodshed on the topic of pandemic preparedness by Ted Cruz.
  • John Yoo says that Biden doesn’t understand the chain of command. But it’s over the whole Brett Crozier/Theodore Roosevelt situation, which is a pretty abnormal peg to hang a sweeping opinion piece on.
  • “Biden Cronies Accused of Withholding Coronavirus Resources for Political Purposes“:

    Joe Biden’s campaign is offering to help states receive coronavirus resources through its own private connections.

    Let me repeat that for the CNN-impaired… Joe Biden is offering to help states get their hands on coronavirus resources through his own private connections.

    In other words, rather than offer these much-needed resources to the federal government or even the state and local governments, Biden’s connections are offering them to his campaign so Biden can pretend to be president while he hides out in his Delaware basement. And Joe Biden is okay with that.

    This is not a joke. This is really happening during the worst week of a pandemic where we are losing upwards of a thousand Americans a day:

    In the early hours of Monday morning, Joe Biden’s campaign sent an email to state leaders offering to connect them with desperately needed coronavirus resources.

    In the email obtained by The Post, Biden’s political chief of staff Stacy Eichner told state officials that the former veep’s presidential campaign had received a “significant number of offers” from organizations and people eager to offer resources.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Is Biden the Warren G. Harding candidate?

    In 1920, Harding was his generation’s “stay at home” candidate. Meanwhile, his opponent, Democrat James A. Cox barnstormed the nation. What did that get him? Cox lost the popular vote by 26 points and was swamped in the Electoral College (404-127).

    The point of this: the “less is more” that some experts think would work best for Biden – limited public appearances, abbreviated comments and media interaction – doesn’t work today. Especially not with an opponent who would be calling him out daily (hourly) on social media (”Lazier Joe”?) if Biden opted for a lower profile.

  • Veepstakes piece. All the usual XX chromosome names: Harris, Warren, Klobuchar, Whitmer, Abrams, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and The Tammys (Baldwin and Duckworth). No mention of Grandma Death.
  • Speaking of which:

  • A large majority of Legal Insurrection readers don’t think Biden will be the actual nominee.
  • And polled Democrats say: “Give us Barabbas Andrew Cuomo!”
  • “Biden polling worse against Trump than Clinton at this point in 2016.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Can Joe Biden build the excitement for his candidacy amid coronavirus?” Yes, nothing says excitement quite like Sleepy Joe…

  • The Trump campaign dropped this devastating video on Biden and China:

  • The usual leftists types are spooked: “Democrats Fear Trump’s New 2020 Strategy Is Working. The president and his team aren’t hiding their plans to make Beijing the main villain in America’s fight against the pandemic.” Ya think? In other news, President Trump’s plan to depict Darth Vader as the main villain of Star Wars also appears to be working…
  • A common viewpoint expressed:

  • Evidently The Princess Bride was rerun recently:

  • Titania McGrath weighs in:

  • “Biden Cuts Hole In Mask So He Can Still Sniff People’s Hair.

    • And finally, some last jabs at Bernie Sanders, since we won’t have him to kick around anymore:

  • Sanders may be out, but he’s still keeping and racking up delegates to pull the party left.
  • “Bernie Sanders Struggling To Stay Six Feet Away From Americans’ Wallets.”
  • Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved.
  • Bernie Tests Negative For President.

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    Bill Maher Blasts SJW Opposition To Calling It “Wuhan Coronavirus”

    April 12th, 2020

    Bill Maher may be a smarmy liberal, but when he’s right he’s right.

    This time he’s calling out the sudden Social Justice Warrior hissy fit over calling it the Wuhan Coronavirus.

    “I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear [burkas] was just a different way instead of an abhorrent human rights violation. It’s not racist to point out that eating bats is batshit crazy. In 2007 researchers at the University of Hong Kong wrote the presence of a large reservoir saw of SARS CoV like viruses in horseshoe bats together with the culture of eating exotic animals in southern China is a time bomb.”

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

    Want to guess how The Daily Beast responded to his point that it wasn’t racist to name a virus after it’s point of origin? That’s right: They called him racist. Social Justice Warriors are as predictable as they are moronic…

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    Our Horrible, Incompetent Media: Coronavirus Edition

    April 11th, 2020

    America’s mainstream media is lousy even in the best of times.

    This is not the best of times.

    All the bias, incompetence, mendacity and just plain manifest stupidity of national media has been on even sharper display than usual during the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

    Consider this roundup just a small sampler of the many ways our media has failed to provide accurate, unbiased news during the crisis:

  • First up is NBC channeling the communist Chinese government:

    The mainstream media’s routine parroting of propaganda from China’s communist government as it relates to their Wuhan coronavirus cases has been well-documented here at RedState and elsewhere. But what continues to be shocking is how many national news media outlets keep doing so without any trace of shame whatsoever.

    Case in point, NBC News, who tweeted out this gem early this morning about the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths reported in the U.S. in a 24 hour-plus time period in comparison to China in the same timeframe:

    U.S. reports 1,264 coronavirus deaths in over 24 hours.

    Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single new coronavirus death was reported. https://t.co/ooXkR9X2L5

    — NBC News (@NBCNews) April 7, 2020

    Two things came to mind to me when I read that tweet:

    First, it came across as an unnecessary cheap shot “gotcha” similar to how the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler tried to dunk on President Trump by saying his comments about the low unemployment rate during the SOTU “did not age well” in light of the millions of jobs lost in recent weeks.

    The second thing was that it sounded like something you’d read on any one of the number of Chinese government-run “media” accounts on Twitter, bragging about how they were doing so much better at combating the virus than the United States.

  • Not only does CNN lie, but they lie about having lied:

    It’s pretty clear that there is a concerted effort by outlets like CNN to bury their erroneous reporting and downplaying of the Wuhan coronavirus threat by deflecting to Fox News, but the evidence shows CNN was among the worst offenders.

    Beyond that, CNN has also been a willing participant in the Chinese government’s propaganda war against the United States, slammed Fox News for covering New York’s response failures – even though CNN’s Jake Tapper covered them the very next day, has purposely and deceptively used the “per capita” label on a selective basis when reporting on US cases in a way that paints the U.S. in an unflattering light, and ran with the absurd “man dies from swallowing fish tank cleaner” story as a way to falsely blame Trump.

  • Why is the New York Times reporting that President Trump had a financial interest in hydroxychloroquine, a patent-expired drug that several different manufacturers produce? To ask the question is to answer it.

    The only conclusion to draw from this is that the paper’s report is another example on a long list of them on how the MSM actually seems to be rooting against the use of hydroxychloroquine as a promising treatment for suffering Wuhan Coronavirus patients because Orange Man Bad, so much so that they’re willing to deceive their readers as to the nature of Trump’s supposed “financial interest” in it.

    Further, this alleged link is that a company that makes a name-brand version is a small percentage of the holdings of a mutual fund President Trump has money in:

    By this standard, I evidently have a “financial interest” in every company in the Fortune 500…

  • There was yet another “sources say” (i.e., #JustTrustMeBro) report that the Pentagon knew about the Wuhan coronavirus in November promoted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (speaking of Democratic Party tools). It took all of twelve hours for the Pentagon to point out that Stephanopoulos was full of shit.
  • On the mendacity front, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes manages to lie on both sides of the same issue: “Chris Hayes, One Month Ago: Trump ‘Personally Pressured’ Health Officials to ‘Manipulate the Numbers Downward.’ Chris Hayes, Yesterday: Trump Inflated the Death Count So He Could Brag When The Numbers Came In Lower.”
  • On the “just plain stupid” front, a reporter asks President Trump why he doesn’t just shut down all grocery stores. Evidently the grocery fairy brings him all his food every week.
  • And stupidity isn’t just limited to the big things: Lots of media figures fell for a fake “Colin Kaepernick signed with the Jets” hoax on Twitter. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Our media even hates just the possibility of hope, as with noted CNN media tool Brian Stelter.

    • Once again, this is just a small sample of the horrible state of our current media. If I wanted to include every cornavirus screwup, I’d still be writing it…

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    LinkSwarm for April 10, 2020

    April 10th, 2020

    Happy Good Friday, everyone!

    Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.

    Speaking of which…

  • Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
  • Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
  • “Dem Governor Who Banned Hydroxychloroquine Gets Caught Hoarding It.”
  • CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
  • “How US bureaucrats deepened the coronavirus crisis to deadly effect“:

    Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing ­fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed ­immunity to it.

    The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.

    The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.

    The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was ­reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.

    At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

    The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without ­severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Twitter using the health emergency to settle political scores?

    Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.

    I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.

    To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.

    Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.

  • Point/Counterpoint: National Review says that Sweden’s non-lockdown solution to coronavirus (isolate elders, but no shutdowns) has been better than our own, but Time disagrees. “Sweden has a relatively high case fatality rate: as of April 8, 7.68% of the Swedes who have tested positive for COVID-19 have died of the virus.”
  • Does the virus have an Achilles heel?
  • Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
  • Another 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.
  • Texas is doing comparatively well:

  • But: “Texas unemployment agency plagued by tech issue, backlogs as claims near 750K.”
  • Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
  • A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
  • “Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
  • Another weird coronavirus wide effect: You can no longer ship packages to Saudi Arabia.
  • New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
  • Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
  • Laredo mandates masks.
  • Keir Starmer replaces Jeremy Corbyn as head of UK’s Labour Party:

    Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.

    British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.

    In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.

    All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.

    Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.

  • That Hungary emergency act the left was screaming “dictatorship!” about last week: worrisome, but not that worrisome:

    The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.

    Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.

  • “‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
  • Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:

  • UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of the ICU for coronavirus. Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
  • Rand Paul has also receivered from his bout with the coronavirus and volunteered to work at a local hospital.
  • Man steals guns from police firearms store…to sell them to cops. I don’t think you thought your cunning plan all the way through there, sport…
  • Feminist media personalities have no idea what it takes to run a business, details at 10:

  • Don’t trust Jussie Smollett in scrubs.
  • Dwight has a good anniversary roundup on the Newhall shooting.
  • Beast Mode.
  • Classic footage of the Gipper, showing what a thoughtful and learned man he was:

  • Cry. Me. A. Freaking. River. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
  • FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
  • Awww:

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    Grandpa Commie Has Left The Building

    April 9th, 2020

    And then there was one:

    Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) announced on Wednesday that he is dropping out of the presidential race.

    Sanders said in a speech from his hometown of Burlington that while his campaign had won the “ideological” battle, “the path toward victory [in the primary] is virtually impossible.”

    “In state after state…we received a significant majority of the votes” from people under the age of 50, Sanders said. “The future of this country is with our ideas.”

    Sanders added, “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible…to exert significant influence over the party platform.”

    Sanders has remained in the primary despite multiple sweeping victories by rival Joe Biden. The Vermont senator has won 883 delegates in state primaries to Biden’s 1,196. Biden gained support from moderate and African American voters to pull ahead of Sanders, while Sanders has relied on younger voters as well as broad support among Latinos.

    Sanders badly misread the moment following his 2016 defeat, thinking his competitive run meant Democrats were yearning for a socialist true believer dedicated to nationalizing everything. What it actually meant was Democrats were desperately yearning for someone who wasn’t Hillary Clinton. The DNC helped engineer his defeat in 2016 and they did so again this year, though we may have to wait a decade or so for tell-all books to describe exactly how the DNC pressured candidates to exit the race after South Carolina to align so perfectly behind Biden right before Super Tuesday, given his campaign’s near-death experience up until then.

    There are tons of Bernie supporters claiming they’ll never vote for Biden ever ever ever, but I suspect most are just Twitter-mad rather than real-life mad. Come October most will have their “Trump just said [same thing Trump has said for five years], and that’s the last straw! I’m voting for Biden!” moment. In theory, some should vote for whoever the Green Party candidate is, which seems likely to be co-founder Howie Hawkins, who is also running as the Socialist Party USA candidate. You would think that watermelon green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside flavor would be perfect for Bernie supporters, but a lot of the 2016 Green and Libertarian Party vote totals were based on how odious Hillary Clinton was. Ditto probable Libertarian candidate Jacob Hornberger, who seems to be holding off the juggernaut that is Vermin Supreme but is unlikely to reach Gary Johnson’s 4 million plus votes in the general election.

    This is clearly Bernie’s last Presidential hurrah, and the hard left will need to pick a new champion for their 2024 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be constitutionally eligible then, but don’t discount the possibility of a celebrity outsider campaign.

    So it’s Biden vs. Trump. Polls show big leads for Biden, but that’s due to The Current Unpleasantness. How quickly does the economy recover, and how long can Democrats hide Biden’s obvious cognitive decline from the American public?

    Does this mean an end to the Clown Car update? You’ll have to tune in Monday to find out…

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    Active Central Texas Amber Alert

    April 8th, 2020

    Close enough to my area to be worth passing on:

    Police are searching for a 12-year-old girl who went missing late Tuesday night and is believed to be in grave or immediate danger.

    Amisty Monrreal is described as standing 5 foot tall, weighing 90 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes.

    She was last seen wearing a black shirt with the number 45 on the front, blue jeans and black/gray Jordan shoes.

    She was last seen around 10 p.m. at a location on Barrett Place, near Hwy. 90 and Nogalitos and police are calling this an abduction. Investigators say she has a medical condition that requires a doctor’s care.

    If you’ve seen Amisty, call the San Antonio Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit at (210) 207-7660.

    Issued about an hour ago. Something for Texas readers who actually leave their house to be on the lookout for…

    Update: Found evidently unharmed.

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    All China’s Lies

    April 7th, 2020

    A roundup on what China is lying about today:

  • Dr. Anthony Fauci talks about China’s Lie Zero:

    According to the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), things became apparent in early January when China claimed “the virus jumped from an animal reservoir to a human and wasn’t being transmitted from human-to-human.”

    “Well, it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case, that the virus was being transmitted from human-to-human. But not only that, but the nightmare that we have is that not only is it transmitted human-to-human, it does it very efficiently,” he explained. “And when the numbers started coming in as to what the morbidity and the mortality was, it was during that period in early to mid-January that it became clear to me that this was not just another SARS. It wasn’t another MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. This was different.”

    He also said he didn’t think that would have changed the spread of the disease, but now we’ll never know…

  • How much higher is the death rate from the Wuhan coronavirus than China’s official death rate? The Washington Post says maybe 16 times higher. “Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.”
  • Remember how relentlessly the mainstream media scoffed at the idea the virus might have gotten loose from the Wuhan virology lab? Very sober people are beginning to rethink that:

    It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.

    The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”

    The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)

    On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”

    Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.

    Plus more discussion about “bat woman” Shi Zhengli and missing institute researcher Huang Yanling. “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”

  • “China floods Facebook with undeclared coronavirus propaganda ads blaming Trump.”

    Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.

    Three official news outlets – Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times – have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.

    The ads, seen millions of times, extolled China’s efforts against Covid-19, downplayed its domestic outbreak, depicted Mr Trump as misguided and racist, and suggested that the virus might have originated in the US.

    Yet all of them initially ran without a political disclaimer, allowing them to hide information about who they were targeting and sometimes letting them sidestep Facebook’s strict rules on political advertising….

    How are people supposed to tell Chinese propaganda from the usual background noise of Trump Derangement Syndrome?

  • More on the same subject:

    China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts.

    In well-documented efforts, China has sought to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and to claim that, among all nations, China has halted the scourge.

    But China’s communist government also is pushing an alternative explanation of the origins of the new coronavirus—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.

    Although that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China–a country that strictly monitors what appears on online platforms, regularly scrubbing what the authorities call “rumors.”

    (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)

    I probably missed several of China’s other cornavirus lies. Feel free to talk about any I missed in the comments below.

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