It should be obvious to any observer that the Antifa riots across the country were obviously coordinated with #BlackLivesMatter marches. Both groups are funded by George Soros. Just as he spent millions to spur the Ferguson riots on, people in both Antifa and #BlackLivesMatters are obviously coordinating their nationwide attacks.
Ace of Spades points out another prong of the George Soros-funded attack: Electing radical DAs willing to ignore the law and release rioters back on the streets without charging them:
George Soros realized that it was very expensive and very hard to attempt to support so many leftwing legislators that they could change the law to make crime, well, not a crime.
So he settled on a new strategy. One that worked. He put a huge amount of money into the campaigns of leftwing, pro-crime prosecutors and attorney generals.
He wouldn’t bother to get laws changed — too difficult! No legislator wants to face a campaign ad against him pointing out, accurately, that he voted to decriminalize crime.
No, he’d just bankroll dozens (hundreds?) of leftwing DAs and AGs to ignore the laws entirely, claiming that prosecutorial discretion gives the absolute power to simply declare that The Law Is No Longer The Law.
Like I said: It worked.
St. Louis’ Kim Gardner is one of George Soros’ success stories.
She accepted several hundred thousand dollars in in-kind donations in the form of positive campaign ads in her favor — to allow her to beat other moderate Democrats who were not pro-criminal in the primary — which were paid for by Stalinesquely named “Safety & Justice Committee,” which is devoted to releasing hardened dangerous criminals from jail to kill citizens.
This committee is funded by George Soros.
Who also funded the Ferguson rioters.
Now Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt says that Gardner is refusing to charge rioters:
In a stunning development, our office has learned that every single one of the St. Louis looters and rioters arrested were released back onto the streets by local prosecutor Kim Gardner. pic.twitter.com/tMZVAyHssw
Schmitt, a Republican, also says rioters in his state could catch federal charges:
Today we announced an unprecedented partnership between my office & federal prosecutors to send a message loud & clear: If you come to Missouri to cause destruction, loot or riot we will prosecute you. We won’t allow you to terrorize our communities. First arrests announced 👇 pic.twitter.com/3dXBM6pY0y
At least one big-city mayor is now calling on the federal government to investigate what appears to be an “organized” effort to foment unrest and engage in rioting, as security experts in other cities discover evidence that many of the weekend’s violent incidents may have been pre-planned and coordinated.
In Chicago, mayor Lori Lightfoot told media Sunday that she believes there is “strong evidence” of an organized effort to use the weekend’s anti-police brutality protests as a cover for violence, Crain’s Chicago Business reports, and said the city is speaking with at least three Federal agencies about a possible joint investigation.
Snip.
“There is no doubt. This was an organized effort last night,” Lightfoot said in a weekend press conference, referring to Friday’s unrest. “There were clearly efforts to subvert the peaceful process and make it into something violent.”
Minneapolis and urban centers across America are burning, most directly in response to the brutal killing of a black man by a white Minnesota police officer. But the rage ignited by the death of George Floyd is symptomatic of a profound sense of alienation that has been building for years among millions of poor, working class urbanites. The already diminished prospects facing such people have only been worsened by the unforeseen onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and the policies devised to combat it.
Like earlier pandemics, the virus has devastated poorer communities, where people live in the most crowded housing, are forced to travel on public transport, and work in the most exposed “essential” jobs, most of which are badly paid. Unlike the affluent of Gotham, some 30 percent of whom were able to leave town and work remotely, the working class remained, forced to endure crowded conditions as the disease raged through the city. No surprise then that inhabitants of the impoverished Bronx have suffered nearly twice as many deaths from COVID-19 as those in the more affluent, but denser borough of Manhattan.
This pattern can be observed globally. In Spain, the bulk of infections and reduced incomes are concentrated in poorer areas. Similar disparities can be found in countries as varied as China, Japan, France, and Italy. Even in egalitarian Singapore, infections have risen precipitously among the country’s migrant workers—an underclass who tend to live in crowded dormitories. Similarly, in Los Angeles the poor have died from COVID-19 at four times the rate of the city’s overall population. In both New Orleans and Detroit, the vast majority of fatalities have been among disproportionately impoverished African Americans.
As if this were not already quite bad enough, we are now starting to see the economic consequences of the lockdowns. In the US, roughly half of all job losses in April were in low-paying fields such as restaurants, hotels, and amusement parks; in contrast information and finance jobs were barely touched. Almost 40 percent of those Americans making under $40,000 a year have lost their jobs as the wage gains made during the first two years of the Trump administration largely evaporated.
Snip.
Perhaps the most alarming development during these riots has been the urgent revival of what urban historian Fred Siegel calls “the riot ideology.” The roots of this thinking can be traced to the late-1960s when they were set down among progressive analysts who decided that violence and looting constituted a just response to abuses by law enforcement and other agents of oppression. This notion became painfully popular during the 1992 LA riots, which I covered as a journalist, when random looting and even killings were applauded by some radical activists as part of a glorious “rebellion” or uprising.
Today, two generations later, this ideology is staging a comeback. Progressive outlets like Vox scold anyone who refers to outbreaks of widespread mayhem and looting as “riots” preferring to describe them as righteous protests; Mother Jones says that anyone using the word “riot” to describe violent looters is intrinsically racist. Writers at the New York Times have even proposed “de-funding” police forces in favor of spreading more money to other government programs. Slate, for its part, endorsed the burning of the Minneapolis police station as “a reasonable reaction” to George Floyd’s death, and suggested that such wanton destruction is a “quintessentially American response, and a predictable one” comparable to the Boston Tea Party and Stonewall.
National Democratic leaders, including presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden, have been strangely reluctant to denounce the violence, while correctly criticizing President Trump for his needlessly inflammatory tweets. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has quoted Martin Luther King’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard” and stripped it of its original context to decorate the current violence with the romanticism of justice. Radical Minneapolis firebrand Rep. Ilhan Omar has suggested that her constituents are “terrorized” by the presence of the police and National Guard.
Deep blue Mayors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a 38-year-old progressive focused heavily on racial injustice, cede the streets to the most violent elements, even abandoning a police station that was set alight—a response former St. Paul Mayor and Senator Norm Coleman called “stunning.” Rather than contain demonstrations, some cities initially conceded critical urban space to the rioters to the point of threatening prime central city real estate. In Chicago, city officials, much like their Medieval counterparts, raised the bridges over the Chicago River to keep the protestors out of affluent parts of the central city.
Remarkably, these mayors seem to be largely indifferent to the rise of largely white, anarchist groups, like Antifa, who can be seen in videos committing acts of vandalism and violence, even over the objections of African American protestors.
— Big League Politics (@bigleaguepol) June 2, 2020
Enough is enough:
These riots stopped being about #GeorgeFloyd a long time ago. Enough is enough. I’m fed up watching us destroy ourselves. It’s time for me to speak. pic.twitter.com/gWAa15tGd8
Antifa is a despicable group whose sole mission is to terrorize this country and its citizens. It deserves to be categorized – and punished – accordingly.
As Antifa showed this weekend, it is a domestic terrorist organization. Period.
— Senator Kelly Loeffler (@SenatorLoeffler) June 1, 2020
This one is everywhere:
Valuable life lesson: a mob is never on your side.
More Ukraine news, China and Iran compete to see who can buy a bigger piece of Slow Joe, Biden’s staff bail out antifa rioters, and he confuses D-Day and Pearl Harbor. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!
“Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach on May 19 made public leaked audio recordings of phone conversations held by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State John Kerry with ex-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko.
“At a press event held in Kyiv on Tuesday, Derkach said U.S. officials asked that Petro Poroshenko ensure the dismissal of the-then Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“One of the conversations on the said issues was allegedly recorded on December 3, 2015, where the voice that’s purportedly John Kerry’s is heard saying: ‘I just wanted to try to urge you to see if there’s a way to get by this problem of replacing the prosecutor general, you know, [Viktor] Shokin because per my perception, he’s blocked the cleanup of the Prosecutor General’s Office,’ said Kerry.”
There’s another recording from March 22, 2016, in which Derkach claims the voices of Biden and Poroshenko are heard again. In it, Biden reiterates his quid pro quod demand for change in the prosecutor general’s office and “the government” (unspecified) in return for $1 billion.
Not surprisingly, Derkach is being accused of being everything from a KGB agent to a Trump shill, but it should be fairly easy to authenticate those voices. Just don’t look for The New York Times to do it.
Meanwhile, also on May 20, the Senate Homeland Security Committee and its chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have finally subpoenaed Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-leaning Washington firm that was doing public relations for Burisma, attempting to burnish its tarnished image. Blue Star’s CEO denies any wrong-doing but for reasons unknown had refused to turn over documents to the committee for months.
Anyway, it’s certain that Biden’s “Ukraine problem” isn’t going to go away. Ditto his China problem, which also involves Hunter.
Many claims were made that Trump would be in Putin’s pocket were he elected U.S. president. The reality is, for similar reasons with considerably more actual evidence, electing Biden would be far more dangerous to our country.
Iranian state-sponsored hackers are looking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections in November, say senior U.S. intelligence officials.
“Iran seeks to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, the current U.S. president, and to divide the country in advance of the 2020 elections,” one official told Just The News.
In addition to hacking the election, the Iranians are looking to sow discord about the pandemic. “Iran is targeting U.S. and international health organizations for COVID-19 information” and selectively release information that would stoke divisions, the official said. This seems unnecessary when the liberal media is already doing that.
Iran is also targeting U.S. electric utilities, and oil and gas companies.
“It’s fairly well known that the Iranian government has invested considerable resources into cyber hacking, and have done so for some time,” said Fred Fleitz, former NSC chief of staff and CIA analyst.
As for their goals in hacking the U.S. elections, can you guess who they want to win?
“Iran’s attempt to interfere in U.S. elections must be analyzed in the context of its deep trouble domestically,” Ramesh Sepehrrad, a cybersecurity executive, explained to Just The News. “With three rounds of major nationwide uprisings calling for regime change, widespread corruption added to the public’s anger, and mismanagement, the cash-hungry regime is extremely vulnerable.”
According to Sepehrrad, the mullahs believe a change in leadership in the United States will benefit them. “Tehran’s strategy is to buy time and survive until November, hoping that a potentially Democratic U.S. President would save them,” she said. “Therefore, given their absolute desperation to survive domestic unrest, economic disaster, and U.S. pressure, Trump’s reelection is a nightmare for the ayatollahs.”
What do you want to bet that our beloved news media suddenly won’t treat election interference by a hostile foreign power as The Worst Thing Ever anymore? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of foreign powers with a Piece of Joe, The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania accused of taking “over $70 million from China, of which $22 million were listed as ‘Anonymous.'”
It’s pretty clear who the commie bastards known for their shoddy lab practices and their weird fetish for gnawing on pangolins badly want to win in November, and it’s not Trump and the Republicans. The Chinese communists want their money’s worth, and they will go all-in for the Democrats who find the chance to hurt Trump at the same time they hurt America too delicious to pass up. Plus, the Dems heartily approve of what Mao’s Pals are doing to freedom-loving Hong Kongers, seeing it as a template for what they would love to do to freedom-loving us.
We need to understand and accept that a vote for anyone with a “D” is a vote for Xi.
Snip.
Let’s look at Joe Biden for a moment, though it will have to be on video since the Geppettos holding his strings are not letting him out of his Delaware dungeon unless a miracle happens and he becomes a real boy.
This is the guy that went publicly incontinent when the Great Wall Gang was shipping Typhoid Mulans over here and Trump cut off that insanity. Travel bans were racist, you know, until they weren’t. And this guy wants to be president, when he remembers he is running for president, though his priority was not saving American lives but not vexing Beijing. This guy is so far in the Red Menace’s pocket that he’s risking lint poisoning.
They channel the digital Dem, asking, “Come on man, is it too much to want a president who takes America’s side?
Well, to the Democrats, the answer is a responding, “Yes, and don’t assume my gender.”
Now, Biden always sides with the PRC because, like the elite whose Guccis he slurps, he’s totally comfortable with the Chinese supplanting the USA as the world’s preeminent nation – that’ll show those flag-waving flyover rubes who’s not boss! The totally-not-senile politician opposed Trump’s tariffs and his attempts to level the playing field, and Hi-Bidder Biden would sign agreements to lock in the former Deliverance trade model. His response to the People’s Liberation Army arms build-up that threatens our Pacific Fleet would be, “Hey man, I believe in building-up arms! I work out and I am strong and I can do more push-ups than you, fat!”
Here’s the other thing. Remember all that idiotic babble about the Russki kompromat of Trump? That somewhere, Putin had this video library of Trump water-sporting with Muscovite rent girls? Well, we all know Joe’s pride n’ joy Hoover went to China and did a big-bucks deal, probably because he’s such a super-achiever who got where he is on his own talents and not at all drafting after his daddy. So, what else do you think he did when he was there? Explored the Great Wall? Marveled at the Forbidden City? Cavorted with every skeeze the ChiCom intel guys could throuple him up with on video?
Did it happen? You want to bet it didn’t? We know the guy got booted from the Navy for dope. We know he got zillions from some Ukrainian oligarch. We know he was accused of forgetting his crack pipe in a rental car. We know he impregnated a stripper. We know he was voted “Least Likely to be the Centerfold of Good Judgment Monthly.”
What are the chances the Chinese Gestapo didn’t try to honey-trap the guy who’s the Winnie the Pooh of hookers n’ blow? What do you think they probably caught him doing on Candid Commie Camera? It’d be like a home movie from Memorial Day weekend in Lake Havasu on Bob Crane’s houseboat.
That Biden is the Democrats’ presumptive nominee is truly remarkable when you think about it. He’s all but abandoned his native tongue. He had one mediocre debate performance while the rest ranged from awful to disastrous. He’s off-script more than Robin Williams during his peak cocaine years on Mork and Mindy, yet everyone over on that side keeps giving him a pass.
As many have noted, this pandemic shutdown has been a boon for Biden and is probably the reason he’s doing well in the polls. Time away from the public eye has been Biden’s friend, train wreck video appearances notwithstanding.
My latest “Democrats want the shutdown to continue” theory doesn’t have to do with tanking the economy, which I still believe is their primary objective. I believe their secondary objective is to leave as little time as possible between the return of the candidates to the campaign trail and the election. Biden is barely able to navigate the tightly scripted affairs that his handlers have him doing from his basement, they’re petrified of the thought of him being out in the wild, off-leash and babbling.
So, the longer Democratic governors can keep things at least in partial shutdown, the more the economy tanks and hurts Trump and the more reason Team Biden has to keep their guy away from cameras where he might eat a booger or sniff a stranger.
I’ll admit, this is the first presidential election since 1984 where I was looking forward to the general election debates. The thought of seeing Trump’s extemporaneous wizardry going head-to-head with Biden’s word salad factory will probably come off as something more akin to British comedy than American political theater. Must-see TV for sure.
There is little doubt that Biden’s biggest gaffe is just waiting for his grand return to campaigning in public. You know it, I know it, and his handlers all have bleeding ulcers because they know it better than anyone. Once he is back out in public, Joe Biden becomes the greatest weapon against Joe Biden. President Trump could go on autopilot and win the election.
Wow, it was awfully convenient that antifa launched their riot spree right after Biden made his “You ain’t black” comment, wasn’t it?
Any questions about the Mueller Investigations impartiality?
This is the prosecutor who also attended Hillary Clinton's tear-filled election night event in 2016. Doing his best to discredit the investigation. https://t.co/xMbn9LnzY5
On the other hand, the Harris reputation for being “top cop” may rule her out.
And the riots may spell doom for Amy Klobuchar’s campaign as well, given that she declined to prosecute Derek Chauvin or other police who had complaints against them.
The Biden campaign makes some more hires. “Mr. Biden’s campaign is designating Addisu Demissie, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Senator Cory Booker’s presidential campaign, as a senior adviser responsible for coordinating the convention. It is also naming Lindsay Holst, who was Mr. Biden’s digital director when he was vice president, to lead special projects for the convention, including its digital side, according to people familiar with the appointments.”
“Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden confused D-Day and Pearl Harbor—as well as the date that Delaware declared its independence from neighboring Pennsylvania—at a Wednesday campaign event. ‘We declared our independence on December the 7th. It’s not just D-Day.'” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit, who notes “Was it over when the Germans landed at Pearl Harbor?”)
I will consider your candidacy if you explain the science behind your opinion that a biological man can be a woman, and your party's position that a baby in the ninth month of pregnancy is a mere cluster of cells. https://t.co/gayelXptRA
Patrick Underwood, the federal protective officer killed in Oakland, was black. So, just as in the 1960s, we have black law enforcement officials being killed by white radicals.
The playbook has been the same one they ran in Fergeson: use the cover of black protestors to bring far-left agitators out to sow disorder and chaos through rioting, looting and arson, while the response to the disorder in (mostly) Democratic Party run locales is ineffectual. That playbook appeared to be aimed at radicalizing black voters so they continued to show up at polls for Democrats without Obama at the top of the ticket. Not only did it fail to do that, the actual voting results seemed counterproductive; Romney won Missouri by about 250,000 votes in 2012, but Trump won it by over 500,000 votes in 2016. Given that, why are George Soros and other financial backers of Antifa and #BlackLivesMatter running the same playbook again in multiple communities around the country?
Here are some possible answers, come complimentary, some contradictory.
With lockdowns ending across so much of the nation, never again would so many people be idle and/or unemployed all at once. Never again would antifa have a chance to wreck so much havoc on so wide a scale. It was now or never.
The radical left always thinks it’s more popular than it actually is, and it actually thought it could topple the U.S. government with violent insurrection.
At its core, BLM is a revolutionary Marxist ideology. Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors, BLM’s founders, are self-identified Marxists who make no secret of their worship of communist terrorists and fugitives, like Assata Shakur. They want the abolishment of law enforcement and capitalism. They want regime change and the end of the rule of law. Antifa have partnered with them, for now, to help accelerate the break down of society.
The US is getting a small preview of the anarchy antifa has been agitating, training and preparing for. Ending law enforcement is a pre-condition for antifa and BLM’s success in monopolizing violence. Those who are harmed first are the weak and vulnerable, the people who cannot protect themselves. Small business owners in Minnesota pleaded for mercy, even putting up signs and messages in support of the rioters, but to no avail.
The destruction of businesses we’re witnessing across the US is not mere opportunism by looters. It plays a critical role in antifa and BLM ideology. Their stated goal is to abolish capitalism. To do that, they have to make economic recovery impossible. Antifa sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to exploit an economically weakened America during the coronavirus pandemic.
The old communist adage that “Reform is the enemy of revolution.” With the pre-cornoavirus economy going gangbusters, the hard left had to do something radical to prevent prosperity from spreading among the black community. So when they torch a bar that a black firefighter built with his life savings, that’s not a lamentable side effect, that’s a direct desired result to punish him for participating in capitalism.
What the left really wants is a chance to insert direct Social Justice Warrior control into the nation’s police departments.
Maybe it was a lure to bait police into overreacting to create another round of martyrs to further radicalize blacks.
The Wuhan coronavirus lockdown wasn’t moving Trump’s poll numbers at all, so more drastic actions were needed.
The aftermath of ObamaGate is going to be bad for the Democratic Party, and they needed a distraction.
“Never let a crisis go to waste.” Maybe they saw it as a chance to transfer more power and control to government now that it’s lockdown powers were dwindling.
Here’s a radical thought: What if the backers and antifa and #BlackLivesMatter want Trump to win? The insane wing couldn’t get Bernie Sanders the nomination, and they can’t control the Democratic Party if Biden wins and leaves the Clinton hacks in charge of the gravy train for the next 4-8 years. As in the 1960s, looting and rioting boost the chances of law and order candidates, which is clearly Donald Trump this year. They need Trump to win again to completely take over the Party for the radical left.
Some random tweets about the rioting:
If only there were some simple way to avoid such a fate.
But watch out if more than 50 people show up at a church this morning. Madison officials are threatening action against the churches. Sad. Now, more than ever, people need to gather together to worship and heal. https://t.co/0RD5anhsJG
Fed LE is not under the control of leftist DAs, police chiefs & mayors. For too long you had Democrat cities pulling back police & releasing rioters immediately w/o serious charges.
By reviewing arrest records, the FBI can determine potential candidates for federal charges. 2/
When the first of these little trust fund sissies figures out he’s not walking out of his cell after 20 minutes with a $50 fine but looking at five years in Leavenworth on a Fed rap, he’ll squeal on his comrades. 4/
This is an opportunity to destroy Antifa root and branch, and to eliminate the armed wing of the Democrat party. Forever
They miscalculated and overstepped – America is absolutely against them and this is the time for @realDonaldTrump to strike a fatal blow against them. 5/
I sure telling ordinary Americans that they "don't get to complain about looting" is a surefire vote winner for November. #BlackLivesMatter and #antifa have done more to ensure Trump's reelection than anyone else.
Uncle Hugo's Bookstore engulfed. I went to this place a couple times and the owner was kind and made good recommendations. RIP. ☹️ pic.twitter.com/OrHJNG5g1w
In Atlanta, the CNN building was heavily vandalized. Other businesses were vandalized and looted, police cars were set on fire and the College Football Hall of Fame looted. Rapper Killer Mike has some thoughts:
Killer Mike confronts CNN for stoking the fire that led to their Atlanta HQ being invaded and trashed:
Fires have been started in the street in downtown Portland. This is a repeat of the antifa riots after Trump won election in 2016. #BlackLivesMatter#antifa#GeorgeFloyd
Dallas wasn’t spared, with downtown and the club-filled Deep Ellum area attacked, at least one police car burned.
In Houston, damage appeared to be less severe, possibly because 200 people were arrested for trying to block a roadway. Some broken glass, but I’m not seeing reports of arson. As always, judiciously applied lawful force tends to nip rioting in the bud.
Don’t believe for a second the laughable “white supremacists did this” talking point the left is trying to foist on the public:
I went thru the Hennepin Sheriff arrest log. Of the 25 arrested for rioting, only 3 were out of state. None of those 3 had supremacy leanings on social media. All hated Trump. One was a Bernie supporter. One posted on FB of going out to protest.
Some of these narratives right now being spouted by major media personalities are bananas. I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility some kind of White Supremacist agitators at the riots. But you have to be willfully blind to pretend Antifa's not there and causing problems.
The question remains: What do hard-left and antifa/#BlackLivesMatters backers like George Soros hope to gain through backing such riots?
🚨🚨 There's only one reason there's protests at the Whitehouse tonight & other cities in America & it has nothing to do with George Floyd or the #Minneapolisprotests. It's because George Soros paid & sent them there. Retweet if you agree this is an old story. INVESTIGATE THAT pic.twitter.com/Hkfw948DwA
It seems that every four years the leftwing media complex manufactures another race riot. Who benefits? Do they think they can prevent an erosion of black voters to Trump by playing the “Racist cops!” card from now until election day? That backfired spectacularly in 2016. Minnesota went narrowly to Hillary Clinton in 2016; did they just ensure that it will now flip to Trump? Is that the preferred outcome, so the insane wing can seize control of the Democratic Party from the corrupt wing?
What? “A former club owner in south Minneapolis says the now-fired police officer and the black man who died in his custody this week both worked security for her club up to the end of last year.” I don’t think anyone had that on their bingo card.
According to the CDC’s current best estimate, the case fatality rate of the coronavirus is .4 percent. And that’s just amongst symptomatic cases, which, the CDC estimates, is 65 percent of all cases. This means the CDC estimates that the fatality rate for all infections across all age groups, symptomatic as well as asymptomatic, is approximately .26 percent.
The CDC does caution that the numbers are likely to change with new data, but considering we’ve gone from 3.4 percent to 2.0 percent to now 0.26 percent. The more data we get, the lower the numbers get. So, I’m thinking it might get even lower.
But, the bigger takeaway from this is that the early doomsday predictions about the coronavirus were all wrong. Everything that justified the lockdowns and the shutting down of our economy was wrong. We need to open this country back up.
There appears to be no statistical connection between the economic pain of the nationwide shutdowns and the number of COVID-19 cases or fatalities. None. Let that sink in for a moment, given we were told we had to lock down America to “flatten the curve” and save lives.
On the other hand, the data does suggest that reliance on mass transit is connected with virus cases and fatalities.
Snip.
There appears to be no statistical connection between improved health outcomes and pandemic policies that forced nearly 40 million people into the unemployment lines. None.
One might expect to see that states that suffered the most in COVID cases or fatalities would also be the states with the highest increases in unemployment as politicians and public health officials in those areas instituted strict measures to slow the disease. Alternatively, states that hadn’t seen much in the way of the virus should be relatively better off economically.
Among the 15 most-populous states, New York has the highest COVID case rate, the highest death rate, and the highest age-adjusted death rate, while its unemployment rate jumped 10.8 percent from February to April.
At the other end of the spectrum, Texas has the lowest case rate, the lowest death rate, and the lowest age-adjusted death rate among the 15 most-populous states. Texas’ unemployment rate increased 9.3 percent over the past two months reported.
But New York City’s mass transit probably was a key contributing factor.
“Andrew Cuomo gave immunity to nursing home execs after big campaign donations.” Because being part of the Democratic Money Complex means never having to admit you’re guilty…
For the first time ever, Twitter.com, the company responded directly to one of the president’s tweets. They inserted a link below this one to declare authoritatively that the tweet was false. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots.” If the user has taken to a Twitter news page with a headline declaring “Trump makes the unsubstantiated claim that mail-in voting will lead to voter fraud.” That’s the official story. Voter fraud never happens no matter what, and it definitely won’t happen with mail-in voting. You are hearing trusted news anchors tell you that, a lot. And they say it like they know it. Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy nut, a flat Earther, a freak. Probably doesn’t vaccinate his kids.
They’re lying. That’s a lie and we know it’s a lie because of fraud at mail-in voting already happens. Not speculating. Do you have Google? Look it up. Ballot harvesting is the problem. Ballot harvesting is the process when the third-party collects and turns in ballots on behalf of another person. It’s only possible with mail-in ballots.
Laws around ballot harvesting vary from state to state. It’s currently legal in 27 states but Democrats want to legalize it in all 50, and, I wonder why. The recent House coronavirus bill declares that “all states” must permit a voter to designate any person to deliver a sealed absentee ballot. The only restriction is ballot harvesters can not be paid based on the number of ballots they collect, but of course, you could easily pay that than a campaign could pay a canvasser for their time or the distance they travel.
With unlimited ballot harvesting, there is no state supervision or chain of custody, to limit on the amount of ballots a single person can collect. Ballot harvesters can go to people’s homes, and they do in California. They pressure them to vote or vote the right way, or they help a person read through a ballot while nudging them on who to vote for.
Why stop there? You could pay a person to sign or turn in a blank ballot… Or simply throw away ballots that don’t vote the right way. We are not saying that all of these methods of fraud are equally likely, you probably could prevent some of them with safeguards but the point is this. Universal mail-in voting with ballot harvesting massively expands the potential for voter fraud and it makes a mockery of the secret ballot.
I don’t care what Twitter tells you, that’s true. It’s obvious. And by the way, it’s been documented. In the past decade, most battles over voter fraud have centered around whether to require an I.D. to vote like most every countries do. But that’s not the real issue… Ballot harvesting is the… choice for those that want to steal an election.
ACLU folds on abortion lawsuit against Texas cities over “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” Which makes you wonder why. Is keeping a slender reed of hope for keeping sanctuary cities for the inevitable illegal alien amnesty more important than the sacrament of abortion? Or maybe, given that they’re all pretty small cities (Big Spring may be the largest) they just didn’t want to spend money on it?
Well, not all of them. No blog is big enough for all China’s lies. But here’s an update on the lies being told, and crimes being committed, by China’s ruling Communist Party.
There are plenty of direct ways the new national security law could backfire on economic freedom in Hong Kong.
For example, it criminalizes “foreign interference” without specifying who the measure targets or where the boundaries lie. Might a Goldman Sachs report out of Hong Kong questioning China’s gross domestic product data put its business charter at risk? What about Nomura Holdings downgrading a key China Inc. company?
International news organizations might feel paranoid about reporting on fraud at Hong Hong-listed companies or China corralling more than 1 million ethnic minority residents in Xinjiang province into “indoctrination camps.” It is hard to see how short sellers like Muddy Waters Research maintain Hong Kong offices when they spotlight alleged fraud at mainland companies, most recently Nasdaq-listed Luckin Coffee.
The extradition bill that helped fuel the 2019 protests, which allowed people to be moved from Hong Kong to the mainland, could return, perhaps imposed by fiat from Beijing. What multinational corporate board or startup team eying an IPO wants to have that worry in the backs of their minds? Or the specter of the Chinese Communist Party remaking Hong Kong’s judiciary and banking system in its image?
The more Xi damages China’s liberal financial zone, the more the foreign companies generating millions of jobs in Hong Kong will question why they should stay.
The Trump administration said it could no longer certify Hong Kong’s political autonomy from China, a move that could trigger sanctions and have far-reaching consequences on the former British colony’s special trading status with the U.S.
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced the decision Wednesday, a week after the government in Beijing declared its intention to pass a national security law curtailing the rights and freedoms of Hong Kong citizens.
“Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997,” Pompeo said in a statement. “No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground.”
Snip.
A finding on Hong Kong’s autonomy was compelled by last year’s Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. The law signed by Trump requires such a certification each year.
Pompeo’s decision opens the door for a range of options, from visa restrictions and asset freezes for top officials to possibly imposing tariffs on goods coming from the former colony.
“The United States stands with the people of Hong Kong as they struggle against the CCP’s increasing denial of the autonomy that they were promised,” Pompeo said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
As with Berlin, how the U.S., Western Europe and, more importantly, the key nations in the Indo-Pacific region react to the events in Hong Kong will end up determining the geopolitical course of this century.
That Hong Kong is no more is a fact. The form of Hong Kong, with its culture forged by the productive union of British rule of law and individual rights with Chinese entrepreneurship and diligence, may last another year or two. But the idea of Hong Kong is dead, killed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) insatiable quest for total control.
The proximate cause of Hong Kong’s demise is the CCP’s demand to use extrajudicial kidnappings, torture and executions to terrorize its 7.5 million people into submission—in short, to rule Hong Kong as it rules Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet and, someday soon it hopes, Taiwan.
The people of Hong Kong saw this day coming, but they were powerless to stop it. Hong Kong’s Basic Law agreement, the contract acknowledging Hong Kongese’ human rights, was always subject to termination whenever the CCP felt powerful enough to do so. It is, as with any agreement the CCP signs, worthless.
In the meantime, China’s communist leaders ramp up their paranoid rantings, claiming foreign “black hands” are behind the unrest in Hong Kong. Concurrently, China’s propaganda mouthpieces continue to press the absurd notion that America started the coronavirus pandemic.
Thus, crushing Hong Kong’s spirit while murdering a few thousand student democracy activists will only embolden Beijing. How can it be otherwise, as it perceives fewer consequences than the slap on the wrist it received after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989?
The problem with bombastic propagandistic lies is that they are sometimes believed. And the CCP appears predisposed to believing its own lies. To “defend” itself, the CCP may soon order its modernized armed forces into action along the first island chain, from the southern tip of Japan to the coast of Vietnam, with Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines.
The urgent task before our generation is to prevent a monstrous darkness from snuffing out freedom’s flame. We must deter the PRC from expanding its horizon to the first island chain while setting the conditions for victory—removing the CCP, as it exists today, from power. We win, they lose.
This task has already started, when the Trump administration, for the first time since the Reagan-era effort to win the Cold War, declared that the U.S. will engage a “whole-of-government” strategic approach to the challenge presented by the PRC. This approach acknowledges that the CCP doesn’t merely present an economic threat, with its unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft, as well as a military threat—but that it also seeks to supplant our values.
Just this morning Instapundit offered up this flashback to 2018: “As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t.”
Over the past month, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has reportedly moved at least 5,000 troops to the “Line of Actual Control,” which demarcates the border between China and India. The mobilization of troops to the Galwan River valley, on the westernmost border between the two countries, led to a clash on May 5, when Chinese and Indian forces engaged in fisticuffs and stone-throwing. In keeping with Sino–Indian border protocols, both sides were unarmed, but the skirmish — and another in the Naku La region near Tibet on May 12 — left several troops injured.
Though the facts on the ground in the remote Himalayan border region are unclear, satellite imagery of the area confirms a rapid military buildup by Chinese forces since April. India has responded in kind, mobilizing troops and artillery to the area in recent days, according to Bloomberg News. An Indian policy analyst who requested anonymity adds that there is also evidence that the two sides have moved aircraft closer to the region.
The apparent trigger for China’s military buildup is the completion of an Indian road in the Galwan River valley up to the Line of Actual Control, according to Indian national-security analyst Nitin Gokhale. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has long held a superior position in this frontier region, with roads and electricity lines that far surpass those on the Indian side. However, “in the last few years, India has been playing catch-up, and has finally built roads up to the LAC,” according to Dhruva Jaishankar, the director of the Observer Research Foundation’s U.S. Initiative. India’s Border Roads Organization, which is currently constructing 61 roads, has now developed the infrastructure to compete with the PLA in the disputed territory. In turn, China has attempted to preserve its advantage by pushing back Indian development, leading to intermittent confrontations. Most recently, in 2017, China’s construction of a road through Doklam, near Bhutan, an ally of India, set off two months of brinkmanship, ending with a Chinese retreat but heightening caution on both sides.
The border dispute pertains primarily to two contested territories: the Aksai Chin plateau to the west and the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh to the east. Chinese offensives in the two areas ignited the 1962 Sino–Indian War, ending with an informal ceasefire as the two sides agreed to the loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control. To Beijing, the LAC granted territory claimed by Delhi on the western side of the border, which contains a strategically crucial road between Tibet and Xinjiang. In the eastern portion of the LAC, however, the PRC effectively ceded what it calls “South Tibet,” retreating to the McMahon Line, the Tibetan–Indian border drawn by British colonial officials in the early 20th century. But PRC officials still consider the McMahon Line a vestige of imperialism, and continue to lay claim to Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state of 2 million people with strong cultural ties to Tibet.
India PM Narendra Modi doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who willingly backs down…
Speaking of confronting China: “U.S. to Expel Chinese Graduate Students With Ties to China’s Military Schools.” “The Trump administration plans to cancel the visas of thousands of Chinese graduate students and researchers in the United States who have direct ties to universities affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army.”
“Chinese Yuan Suddenly Tumbling.” Wow, it’s almost as if cracking down on Hong Kong has negative repercussions for China’s economy…
YouTube deleting comments with two phrases that insult the Chinese communist party.” Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.”
Of course: “Twitter Fact Checks President Trump – But Not Communist China.” (Update: Evidently Twitter started to fact-check ChiCom statements literally this morning.)
GQ “reporter” Julia Ioffe seems really unclear on the concept that Pompeo’s declarations triggers sanctions. So naturally she got schooled. And naturally, she deleted her tweet rather than issuing a correction… (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
At least some economists think we’re in for a V-shaped recession. And naturally, Democrats are furious:
In early April, Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration and now a professor at Harvard, was speaking via Zoom to a large bipartisan group of top officials from both parties. The economy had just been shut down, unemployment was spiking, and some policymakers were predicting an era worse than the Great Depression. The economic carnage seemed likely to doom President Donald Trump’s chances at reelection.
Furman, tapped to give the opening presentation, looked into his screen of poorly lit boxes of frightened wonks and made a startling claim.
“We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” he said.
The former cabinet secretaries and Federal Reserve chairs in the Zoom boxes were confused, though some of the Republicans may have been newly relieved and some of the Democrats suddenly concerned.
“Everyone looked puzzled and thought I had misspoken,” Furman said in an interview. Instead of forecasting a prolonged depression-level economic catastrophe, Furman laid out a detailed case for why the months preceding the November election could offer Trump the chance to brag — truthfully — about the most explosive monthly employment numbers and GDP growth ever.
Since the Zoom call, Furman has been making the same case to anyone who will listen, especially the close-knit network of Democratic wonks who have traversed the Clinton and Obama administrations together, including top members of the Biden campaign.
Snip.
The Covid-19 recession started with a sudden shuttering of many businesses, a nationwide decline in consumption, and massive increase in unemployment. But starting around April 15, when economic reopening started to spread but the overall numbers still looked grim, Furman noticed some data that pointed to the kind of recovery that economists often see after a hurricane or industry-wide catastrophe like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Consumption and hiring started to tick up “in gross terms, not in net terms,” Furman said, describing the phenomenon as a “partial rebound.” The bounce back “can be very very fast, because people go back to their original job, they get called back from furlough, you put the lights back on in your business. Given how many people were furloughed and how many businesses were closed you can get a big jump out of that. It will look like a V.”
Furman’s argument is not that different from the one made by White House economic advisers and Trump, who have predicted an explosive third quarter, and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who said in late April that “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.” White House officials were thrilled to hear that some of their views have been endorsed by prominent Democrats.
“I totally agree,” Larry Kudlow, the head of the White House National Economic Council, replied in a text message when asked about Furman’s analysis. “Q3 may be the single best GDP quarter since regular data. 2nd half super big growth, transitioning to 4% or more in 2021.” He called Furman, who he said he knows well, “usually a straight shooter. Hats off to him.”
“I have been saying that on TV as well,” said Kevin Hassett, a top Trump economic adviser, who pointed to a Congressional Budget Office analysis predicting a 21.5 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter. “If CBO is correct we will see the strongest quarter in history after the weakest in Q2.”
As a general rule, it’s best not to punch yourself in the nads, but if you do, it’s far better to get up, shake it off and keep walking than it is to lie weeping on the sidewalk. The American economy was going gangbusters before The Great Wuhan Recession, and if Democratic governor’s don’t try to keep obviously futile lockdowns in place in order to tank the economy, there’s no reason* it can’t start to do better again in the summer and fall.
That, of course, is precisely what Democrats fear.
The former Obama White House official said, “Even today when we are at over 20 million unemployed Trump gets high marks on the economy, so I can’t imagine what it looks like when things go in the other direction. I don’t think this is a challenge for the Biden campaign. This is the challenge for the Biden campaign. If they can’t figure this out they should all just go home.”
As Byron York noted, Democrats fear nothing so much as economic growth.
*OK, there is one reason: A crushing debt load that neither political party seems willing to address. On the other hand, we’ve been fearing the effects of excessive government debt for quite some time now. The Gods of the Copybook Heading can’t be put off forever, but with Treasury 30 year yields under 1.5%, there’s no sign that our government’s bipartisan spending spree has (yet) dulled the world’s appetite for American debt.
For those who feel my video offerings have been too tank-centric as of late, here’s a video featuring the design choices behind everyone’s favorite flying tank killer, the A-10 Warthog.
