ChiComs Demand Aussie Journalist Tim Blair Apologize; Blair Shoves A Fork In Their Eye

April 5th, 2020

This is how you respond to communist tyrants who demand you apologize for telling the truth about them:

The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, who took gentle issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis.

Following is a point-by-point response to the Consulate General and China’s communist dictatorship:

Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.

If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.

Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.

Sure it does. How professional and science-based was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?

The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”.

The World Health Organisation also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its Goodwill Ambassador and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself”.

The World Health Organisation does a lot of stupid stuff.

So what is the real motive behind your attempt to repeatedly link the virus to China and even stating that the novel coronavirus was “made in China”?

Our motive is accuracy. That’s why we don’t link the virus to Bognor Regis or state that it was “made in Panama”.

Snip.

The effectiveness of China’s epidemic prevention and control has fully underlined the people-centred philosophy of the Communist Party of China and the strong advantages of the Chinese system.

In 2018, Amnesty International reported that China executed more citizens than the rest of the world combined.

Please tell us more about your “people-centred philosophy” and how many bullets it requires.

Instead of admitting and facing facts, the articles in your newspaper have wantonly attacked and smeared the CPC and the Chinese government with vicious language.

And yet we haven’t been jailed or shot! Where’s the justice in that?

Is your judgement based on the well-being of the people or do you have an ideological prejudice?

We will admit to an ideological prejudice against deadly tyranny. It’s a tragic failing on our part.

That’s the way you do it…

(Hat tip: Iowahawk via Amy Curtis.)

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Posted in Communism, Media Watch | 1 Comment »

Coronavirus 1, American Regulation 0

April 4th, 2020

One reason the coronavirus fight has been hampered is America’s lumbering regulatory state:

Entrepreneur Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo have each touted chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, as a promising treatment option for those infected with Covid-19. Some media quickly pounced on the president’s statement. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, quickly clarified that the agency had not in fact approved the drug as a safe and effective treatment for the new disease, shortly after the president claimed that the drug was “approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.”

Chloroquine is in fact available for prescription in the United States. It’s already being tried as a treatment for the new virus in U.S. hospitals. And multiple manufacturers are rushing to produce more and get it to doctors.

The confusion over chloroquine—along with the broader performance of U.S. regulatory agencies during this epidemic—highlights how our federal process for reviewing and approving drugs and medical devices still leaves much to be desired. Our regulatory regime is costing lives. The early administrative failings of the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, which greatly worsened the crisis in the United States, show how ugly that can be.

Getting a new pharmaceutical compound to market in the U.S. is an extraordinarily complex process. Development time is usually more than a decade. Costs add up to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. After an innovator submits an Investigational New Drug application, the FDA requires a three-stage testing process, then the submission of a formal New Drug Application that typically includes hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation.

Some Chloroquine discussion skipped.

With cases and deaths growing exponentially, federal regulatory authorities can be expected to fast-track new approaches. The agencies were much less willing to afford latitude to the private sector just weeks ago, though—and the United States is now much more vulnerable as a result. Chinese authorities uploaded the SARS-CoV-2 genome onto the Internet on January 10. The CDC developed its own testing protocol by January 21; international scientists developed a different test by the same date, which was soon disseminated en masse by the World Health Organization.

The U.S. testing process failed. The day that the CDC announced it had developed its testing protocol, January 21, was the date of the first documented American case of coronavirus. South Korea documented its first case the same day. But by March 17, the United States had administered only 125 tests per 1 million people; South Korea had administered more than 5,000 tests per 1 million over the same time span. By aggressive testing, South Korea was able to trace viral spread and contain it. Without it, the U.S. was left with little choice but the draconian measures that have shut down much of American life.

As has been widely reported, the CDC’s in-house testing design was flawed, thus compromising early testing results. Mistakes happen, but the impact of the test-design flaw was much greater than it should have been—owing to the U.S. bureaucracy’s tightly controlled process. Even had the CDC test worked perfectly, not nearly enough tests would have been available for wide-scale testing on the South Korean model.

More on the same theme:

We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.

But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.

Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.

Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.

“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”

The Times highlights Dr. Helen Chu, who early on had taken swabs from the noses of patients in Washington State who seemed to be suffering from a particularly nasty virus. She proposed to local, state and federal officials testing those swabs for unusual coronavirus infections.

Instead, the CDC told Dr. Chu she’d have to get FDA approval for her test. The FDA nixed it because the lab she worked in wasn’t “certified” to conduct such tests, something that takes months to do.

So early data that could have helped fight what later became a raging pandemic weren’t available. All because a bureaucracy went strictly by the book.

Let’s hope the current crisis results in significant regulatory reform.

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Posted in Regulation | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for April 3, 2020

April 3rd, 2020

Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I hope all of you are avoiding going stir-crazy. I bet you can guess the top topics this week:

  • U.S. Intelligence confirms what anyone not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome figured out long ago: China’s communist government has been lying about the Wuhan Coronavirus all along:

    China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, 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, according to three U.S. officials.

    The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

  • British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
  • China’s viral coronavirus propaganda campaign:

    China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.

    While 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 its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.

  • The Chinese Communist Party vs. America:

    The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.

    At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.

    If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.

    Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of China, I’ve been thinking of doing a separate post on this piece on just how filthy and unsanitary China is, but the topic is just too gross for me to deal with it at length.
  • Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
  • I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
  • The Wuhan Coronavirus has eight different strains.
  • Dr. Vladimir Zelenko has now treated 699 coronavirus patients with 100% success using Hydroxychloroquine Sulfate, Zinc and Z-Pak.
  • Coronavirus dispatches from a New Orleans ER doctor. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Looking at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s coronavirus projections, both past and present.

    The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.

    Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….

    If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.

    President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.

    Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.

  • More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
  • Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
  • “If you claim that calling it ‘Wuhan coronavirus’ is racist, you are part of the cover-up.”
  • Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
  • Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
  • “Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”

    As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.

    Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.

    Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.

    With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.

    Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • Speaking of Italy, they’re burning the EU flag and threatening to leave over the EU’s lousy coronavirus response.
  • Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
  • The danger of Huawei’s 5G rollout:

    Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?

    Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.

  • Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
  • What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
  • Justice Department finally weighs in that boys and girls are biologically different. About damn time…
  • Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Don’t use Zoom. All sorts of security and privacy concerns. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • “Have you tried powering down and then restarting your Boeing 787? Try that and see if it fixes the problem…”
  • “China: ‘We’ve Completely Cured Coronavirus And Everything Is Fine Here And No One Is Allowed In To Check.”
  • Well, that wasn’t very smart. (Hat tip: johnnyk2001.)
  • Analysis: True:

  • Dwight offers handy tips on vehicle ambush counterattacks, for when the roving cannibal antifa hijack mobs try to attack you later this year.
  • “Chick-Fil-A Temporarily Changes Slogan To ‘Eat Fewer Bats.'”
  • “New York To Raise Taxes On Coronavirus Causing It To Flee State.”
  • Heh:

  • Heh with music:

    (Hat tip: Carpe Donktum.)

  • Good boy!

  • So! Many! Good! Boys!
    

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Military, unions | No Comments »

    Cornonavirus Economic Resources: Texas and Elsewhere

    April 2nd, 2020

    Since the Wuhan Coronavirus has delivered a quick kick to the nads of the economy, I’m sure being out of work really sucks right now. Here’s a quick roundup on economic resources that might help, both in Texas and elsewhere.

  • Candor has a long list of companies that covers which are still hiring (and there are many), which have hiring freezes in place, which are having layoffs, etc., along with more info, links to company hiring portals, etc.
  • Hiring statuses at Austin companies. Just started March 31, so there’s only a few companies there now.
  • Some newly unemployed Texans have complained that they can’t get through to Texas Workforce Commission by using either the website or by either telephone numbers (800-939-6631 for claims or 800-558-8321 for Tele-Serve). Two pieces of advice: For the website, try late at night or early morning when it’s not so slammed. For the telephone, the listed hours are 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and I hear the best times to call are between 5-6 PM (when the phones are still staffed in El Paso).
  • If you’re stuck home under quarantine, now is a good time to increase your skill stack by taking courses to give your resume buzzword compliance. If you’re signed up through TWC, they have free online courses in a variety of areas.
  • Cisco also has an online learning portal and access to some sandbox tools, not only for their own stuff but also several basic technology tools.
  • CodeAcademy offers basic tech courses for free.
  • If it’s been a while since you looked for a job, you need to be on Indeed and LinkedIn. There are others, but those are pretty much mandatory.
  • There are various loan programs available to small businesses.
  • If you live in the Austin area, there’s an Austin digital jobs Facebook group that’s worth joining, and which I got some of the links above from.
  • One tiny bit of good news in the gloom: Due to the coronavirus outbreak, you tax return deadline has been extended to July 15.

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | No Comments »

    Tucker Carlson On Mask and Hydroxychloroquine Lies

    April 1st, 2020

    Here’s a double-shot of Tucker Carlson on two different lies being bandied about but our media (and parts of our various governments) on effective tools to fight the Wuhan coronavirus.

    Hydroxychloroquine given in combination with antibiotics looks like an effective combination. So why do so many Democrats insist it doesn’t work, going so far that a douple of Democratic governor’s have tried to ban it’s use for treating coronavirus? “If Trump is for it, they’re against it, even if it might save American lives.”

    “The thing we need above all is the truth.”

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    Posted in Democrats, Media Watch, video | No Comments »

    Dispatches from the Texas Lockdown

    March 31st, 2020

    It seems forever since Texas went into full lockdown mode over the Wuhan coronavirus, but it’s only been a week. Since I was already working from home full-time, I’m doing fine, but I can understand how more social people might be climbing the walls by now. Here’s a quick roundup of notable Texas coronavirus news.

  • Total statewide coronavirus cases top 2,900.
  • Texas Counties with the highest number of coronavirus cases as of this morning are:
    1. Harris: 563
    2. Dallas 549
    3. Tarrant 238
    4. Travis 206
    5. Denton 191
    6. Bexar 168
    7. Collin 160
    8. Fort Bend 138

    (The “per county” cases can be found on the “Admin2” tab on the lower left.) For those unfamiliar with Texas geography, Denton and Collin are both Metroplex suburban counties, while Fort Bend is directly southwest of Harris.

  • Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered enforcement of the quarantine order at the Louisiana border.

    Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday tightened travel to Texas by ordering some motorists from Louisiana to self-quarantine for two weeks.

    The new restrictions, effective noon Monday, came as President Donald Trump extended social distancing guidelines through April 30, preventing all nonessential travel in the country.

    Louisiana’s status as a hot spot for the novel coronavirus grew Sunday to more than 3,500 positive cases statewide. Under the new rules, drivers with commercial, medical, emergency response, military or critical infrastructure purposes for entering Texas would be exempted.

    A spokesman for the Department of Public Safety said Sunday the agency was not prepared to comment on the details of the new measures.

  • Both Governor Abbott and Travis County doctors are looking for specific hospitals to isolate coronavirus patients in.
  • In Houston, they’re looking to reopen at least one closed hospital, and in Dallas they’re looking at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center as an overflow facility.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued an opinion prohibiting counties and municipalities from banning firearms sales during the emergency.
  • Houston Methodist hospital is the first to treat coronavirus patients with recovered patient blood.
  • If the local HEB is any measure, the worst of the panic buying appears to be over, though there are still hole in the shelves. Meat was abundant, I was able to find olive oil (missing last week), and everything except toilet paper seemed obtainable.

    • All in all, we seem to be doing a lot better than New York and California. Which is usually the case in non-emergency times as well…

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    Posted in Austin, Texas | 5 Comments »

    Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update for March 30, 2020

    March 30th, 2020

    The no campaigning campaign continues, Biden gets #MeTooed, a rare Bernie victory, and A New Challenger Appears! It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!

    Delegates

    Right now the delegate count stands at:

    1. Joe Biden 1,217
    2. Bernie Sanders 914
    3. Elizabeth Warren 81*
    4. Michael Bloomberg 55*
    5. Pete Buttigieg 26
    6. Amy Klobuchar 7
    7. Tulsi Gabbard 2

    *Both these counts have dropped since last week. Do we blame these shenanigans on the media or the DNC?

    Polls
    Once again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak.

  • Real Clear Politics polls.
  • 538 poll average.
  • Election betting markets.

    • Pundits, etc.

  • “13 Presidential Primaries Have Now Been Delayed Over The Coronavirus”: Connecticut, Indiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and Delaware have all delayed primaries, and Pennsylvania is about to, while Texas, Alabama, North Carolina and Mississippi have all delayed runoffs. California, Maryland, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Wyoming are all changing various aspects of their respective voting processes.
  • Remember how all those Democrats swore off SuperPacs?

    The anti-super PAC frenzy reached new heights in this year’s Democratic primary. Candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and others effectively told their supporters to stay on the sidelines, either explicitly requesting that super PACs not support them, or blasting the groups at every turn.

    As things got desperate, many of these candidates appeared to realize their mistake. They scrambled to get a new message out: I’ll take any help I can get. Joe Biden was the first to reverse his opposition to super PACs, doing so by late October. A month later, as California senator Kamala Harris’s campaign was falling apart, she, too, dropped her rejection of independent support.

    The party’s backtracking on super PACs came full circle in February when Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reversed course. Her early and forceful rejections of super PACs had set the tone for the field, and she went even further by making corruption and money-in-politics the top themes of her campaign. But that was when her campaign was a powerful front-runner — after poor showings in the early primary states, Warren needed a Hail Mary, and so changed her tune.

    For every candidate except Biden, the reversal was too late, and the campaign could not be saved.

    Warren claims she only dropped her opposition to super PACs because her opponents were accepting their help. But she surely knew that not every candidate would play by her rules. The pledges to reject super PAC support were an electoral ploy by candidates to brand themselves as cleaner than the other guy. It simply didn’t pay off.

    Instead, with independent speakers on the sidelines, the candidates who entered the primary with the biggest advantages coasted.

  • Interested in what Pete Buttigieg has to say about his presidential run? Me neither, but here it is.

    • Now on to the clown car itself (or what’s left of it):

  • Former Vice President Joe Biden: In. Twitter. Facebook. Former congressional staffer accuses Biden of penetrative sexual assault. What do you bet those thousands of Democratic media figures who parroted “credibly accused of sexual assault” for the nonsense Kavanaugh charges won’t be using that phrase this time around? Let’s see what Biden previously said about the issue:

    When it comes to #MeToo sexual misconduct issues, former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, has made it no secret where he stands: automatically believe women.

    “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real,” said Biden during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who faced accusations that as a teenager he had assaulted a woman at a party.

    As vice president, Biden played an important role in the Obama administration’s efforts to compel colleges and universities to take sexual violence more seriously—and to adopt policies that limited the due process rights and presumption of innocence for the accused. In recent years, his rhetoric on these issues has been in lockstep with #MeToo activists.

    Despite his public pronunciations on the subject of never touching women without their explicit verbal consent, Biden has previously faced accusations that he was too handsy with people. But now the former vice president is facing a much more serious accusation of sexual assault, from an alleged former staffer named Tara Reade.

    No, not that one.

    It remains to be seen whether the mainstream media will assign Reade’s story as much credibility and importance as that of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh; they certainly have not done so yet. In any case, supporters of Biden—as well as the candidate himself—should take this opportunity to reflect on whether automatic belief is a useful or practical approach for handling decades’ old claims of misconduct.

    What has the mainstream media had to say about these accusations? You know as well as I: virtually nothing. What is the main things Democrats expect of Joe Biden? A pulse:

    For the foreseeable future, there will be no more speeches in front of hundreds, or lines of people waiting to shake Biden’s hand. There may not even be the glossy fanfare of a convention with a prime-time address. But, truthfully, all those things were always sort of beside the point. Like on that morning in McClellandville, and countless other ones besides, Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump—his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.

    Biden backed Pelosi’s obstructionism while millions lost their jobs:

    Amid this partisan wrangling, Biden released a video condemning Trump and McConnell for putting a “corporate bailout ahead of millions of families,” echoing the arguments Pelosi and others used for their obstruction.

    “President Trump and Mitch McConnell are trying to put a corporate bailout ahead of millions of families. You know, it’s families. It’s simply wrong. We should be focusing on families, but the White House and the United States Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion slush-fund for corporations,” Biden says in the video. “Republicans refused to increase social security at the same time, to forgive student loans, to take the necessary steps to stop evictions, ensure food and nutrition for vulnerable families.”

    Joe Biden called on McConnell to hold a vote on Democratic priorities, rather than voting on the compromise bill that had been worked out ahead of time. He suggested the compromise bill would not help small businesses, workers, and communities — even though it includes cash pay-outs to most Americans, an increase in unemployment benefits, and more.

    Pelosi’s busted power play hurts Biden:

    Unlike the 2008 financial crisis or any other burst bubble, the coronavirus is an outside force, a threat forcing the government to ask that all nonessential workers either work from home or forgo their paychecks. The nation has proved willing to take the immediate economic hit without any promises, but if the government wants to maintain the status quo for weeks or even months, workers and small businesses need immediate cash relief. This is a conclusion that has united the political spectrum from Mitt Romney to Bernie Sanders and manifested itself in the Senate Republicans’ imperfect but necessarily broad relief package.

    But after a week of bipartisan discussions, congressional Democrats have tried to nuke the bill, denying direct cash payments to the overwhelming majority of the nation and small businesses. And now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out with her own bill, a Trojan Horse of a socialist Christmas list disguised as an emergency aid package.

    As businesses shutter around the country and workers struggle to make their final paycheck for the foreseeable future last long enough to feed their children, Pelosi produced her own crisis bill that would bail out the U.S. Postal Service, provide $10,000 student loan bailouts, and demand that companies accepting federal aid offer $15 minimum wage and permanent paid leave.

    The entire thesis of the Biden campaign goes something as follows: Trump is a uniquely partisan president who engages in trollery and trickery unbecoming of the White House. Joe Biden, contrarily, is a respected statesman with a documented history of working across the aisle. If you want a president who doesn’t tank the stock market with vile tweets, or even one who doesn’t force the nation to obsess over the federal government, vote for Barack Obama’s (former) BFF.

    Biden can sell that message, and as his primary proved, he does so effectively. But the rest of his caucus cannot. It’s one thing for Democrats to try and tank openly bipartisan bills like Trump’s criminal justice reform legislation or even impeach him during a time of peace and prosperity. It’s entirely another to sabotage a week of negotiations in the hopes of passing the discount Green New Deal while laid-off workers wonder how they’ll pay their water bill next month.

    Joe Biden may value bipartisanship, and we already saw the Obama administration rise to the occasion and work with Republicans when crises arose. But the rest of the Democratic Party isn’t playing Uncle Joe’s game, and the voters who gave Democrats the House in 2018 are seeing the evidence in a horrifying, real-time display.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) “Biden’s First Coronavirus Shadow-Briefing Was a Disaster:”

    Biden’s first attempt at appearing presidential and ready to handle a crisis was another gaffe-prone disaster that his campaign most certainly regrets doing.

    In the middle of his Monday briefing, Biden apparently lost his train of thought while explaining what he thinks Trump should do during the crisis.

    “I’m glad the president has finally activated the National Guard. Now we need the armed forces and the National Guard to help with hospital capacity, supplies, and logistics. We need to activate the reserve corps of doctors and nurses and beef up the number of responders dealing with this crush of cases,” he said, before shuffling papers and then gesturing to someone off-camera that there was a problem. “And, uh, in addition to that, in addition to that, we have to make sure that, we are… Well, let me go to the second thing.”

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Like Obama, Biden only sounds smart and together when his TelePrompTer is working. A low-energy campaign for a low energy candidate:

    Sidelined and confined to his house by the dictates of coronavirus social distancing, the former vice president has been limited to intermittent appearances from a makeshift studio in his basement. They have been awkward and low-energy, but that doesn’t really set them apart from most other Joe Biden appearances.

    If there’s any candidate who could thrive by having very limited public exposure and existing mostly as a line of a ballot, it’s the longtime presidential aspirant who hadn’t won a primary until a couple of weeks ago.

    Biden is winning the Democratic nomination on the basis of not being Bernie Sanders and wants to get elected president on the basis of not being Donald Trump. He’s as purely a negative candidate as we’ve seen in a very long time, running largely on who he isn’t and what he won’t do.

    He’s the presidential candidate as cipher.

    Biden’s pitch to young progressives: Hey babe, talk a walk on the mild side. Is Biden launching a podcast? I look forward to listening to that in the same sense I look forward to watching the Cats movie: in joyous anticipation of an epic train-wreck. The Decline of Sundown Joe:

    Joe Biden on China: A triptych:

    This one, though, hey, we’ve all been there:

  • Update: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: Convention Substitute? With more than half the possible delegates already allocated, it would be impossible for Cuomo to jump into the race and win an outright delegate victory, but there’s been a lot of chatter about him being a brokered convention substitute for Biden. Meet “Mr. Contingency Plan“:

    Democrats are publicly talking about “contingency options” for their July convention in Milwaukee in case the coronavirus persists in being a public-health threat. But privately, some are also talking about needing a Plan B if Joe Biden, their nominee apparent, continues to flounder.

    Some Democrats are openly talking up New York governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has soared during the crisis, as a Biden stand-in. Yesterday, a Draft Cuomo 2020 account on Twitter announced that “Times have changed & we need Gov. Cuomo to be the nominee. Our next POTUS must be one w/an ability to lead thru this crisis.”

    Snip.

    Democrats are increasingly worried that Joe Biden will have trouble being relevant and compelling in the long four months between now and when he is nominated in July. Lloyd Constantine, who was a senior policy adviser to New York governor Eliot Spitzer from 2007 to 2008, puts it bluntly: “Biden is a melting ice cube. Those of us who have closely watched as time ravaged the once sharp or even brilliant minds of loved ones and colleagues, recognize what is happening to the good soldier Joe.”

    Indeed, Biden seemed to disappear when the virus began dominating the news cycle early in March. Biden’s media presence “abruptly shriveled,” writes Kalev Leetaru, a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. In contrast, daily mentions of Cuomo as of last Sunday “accounted for 1.4 percent of online news coverage compared with 2.9 percent for Trump.”

    Of course, if that actually came to pass, it would bring up two questions: What do Bernie Sanders fans think about the party deciding second place means bupkis when the DNC can just anoint a replacement? And how would millions of Biden’s black supporters feel upon finding out that their votes don’t matter compared to the will of a tiny clique of party insiders? How about Cuomo as Veep pick? Well, aside from the problem that Biden promised to pick a woman, there are other problems:

    Party poobahs would be against it: Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez tends hard left; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no love for Cuomo, and African-American leaders, ­arguably the organization’s single most powerful bloc, see the governor as an impediment to party diversity and thus to their own interests.

    Certainly, Cuomo’s 10-year tenure itself bodes caution. Yes, he has been a reliable progressive, especially on guns, trendy egalitarian economic legislation and the various woke social causes. But he has also been aggressively pro-charter schools and thus a poison pill to teachers unions, an often thuggish and influential special interest; this alone could kill his candidacy.

    Moreover, Cuomo’s various ­upstate economic-development schemes — most disastrous in execution and each scandal-plagued along the way — are in the background now. But they’d move center-stage if he was on the ticket, so why would Biden want that to happen?

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Vermont Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders: In. Twitter. Facebook. He won the Democrats abroad primary, netting an estimated nine delegates to Biden’s four. Is he staying in the race until June? More on that theme:

    James Zogby, a Democratic National Committee member who is on the board of “Our Revolution,” said in an interview that he saw no reason for Sanders to give up his national platform now.

    “We don’t know what will befall us,” he said. “I mean, who knew two months ago that we’d be where we are with the virus. Who knows where we’ll be two months from now? Who knows what Bernie does, what Biden does, what else happens that will change the dynamics, so it would be irresponsible to leave the race, as some have suggested.”

    Zogby said Sanders should not exit the race unless Biden becomes the presumptive nominee — which he could do by hitting the necessary threshold of 1,991 pledged delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the convention.

    “But even then, don’t forget, Bernie Sanders is not just a candidate,” Zogby said, pointing to Sanders’ place atop the progressive movement. “He has every reason to stay in for that reason.”

    “Bernie’s supporters say that the coronavirus provides an opportunity for him to get back in the race, but of course they would. Bernie didn’t feel a need to vote on the stimulus package, preferring to livestream with members of the squad. 15% of Sanders supporters say they’ll vote for Trump if Biden is the nominee. Speaking of which:

    • Out of the Running

    These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:

  • Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti.
  • Losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams
  • Actor Alec Baldwin
  • Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
  • Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
  • Former California Governor Jerry Brown
  • Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown
  • Montana Governor Steve Bullock (Dropped out December 2, 2019)
  • South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg (Dropped out March 1, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Former one-term President Jimmy Carter
  • Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey, Jr.
  • Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020 and endorsed Warren)
  • Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
  • New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (Dropped out September 20, 2019)
  • Former Maryland Representative John Delaney (Dropped Out January 31, 2020)
  • Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard (Dropped out March 19, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
  • Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
  • New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Dropped out August 29, 2019)
  • Former Tallahassee Mayor and failed Florida Gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum
  • Former Vice President Al Gore
  • Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel (Dropped out August 2, 2019)
  • California Senator Kamala Harris (Dropped out December 3, 2019)
  • Former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper (Dropped out August 15, 2019; running for Senate instead)
  • Former Attorney General Eric Holder
  • Washington Governor Jay Inslee: Dropped Out (Dropped out August 21, 2019; running for a third gubernatorial term)
  • Virginia Senator and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Vice Presidential running mate Tim Kaine
  • Former Obama Secretary of State and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
  • Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.(Dropped out March 2, 2020 and endorsed Biden.
  • New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu
  • Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe
  • Oregon senator Jeff Merkley
  • Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton (Dropped out August 23, 2019)
  • Miramar, Florida Mayor Wayne Messam: (Dropped out November 20, 2019)
  • Former First Lady Michelle Obama
  • Former West Virginia State Senator Richard Ojeda (Dropped out January 29, 2019)
  • Former Texas Representative and failed Senatorial candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (Dropped out November 1, 2019)
  • New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (constitutionally ineligible)
  • Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (Dropped out February 12, 2020)
  • Ohio Representative Tim Ryan (Dropped out October 24, 2019)
  • Former Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak (Dropped out December 1, 2019)
  • Billionaire Tom Steyer. (Dropped out February 29, 20020)
  • California Representative Eric Swalwell (Dropped out July 8, 2019)
  • Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. (Dropped out March 5, 2020)
  • Author and spiritual advisor Marianne Williamson (Dropped out January 10, 2020)
  • Talk show host Oprah Winfrey
  • Venture capitalist Andrew Yang (Dropped out February 11, 2020, later endorsed Biden)

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    President Donald Trump’s Full March 29, 2020 Speech on the Coronavirus Crisis

    March 29th, 2020

    Seeing huge praise for this on Twitter, including Scott Adams saying it’s the best he’s ever seen. I’ve cut off 37 minutes of waiting at the beginning. Skip to 40 minutes in for President trump to start speaking.

    The bad news is evidently that the lockdown recommendations are going to be extended through April 30.

    It is what it is.

    I just started watching it. I’m offering it up here as a Full Service Blog post.

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    Joe Rogan Interviews Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm on the Wuhan Coronavirus

    March 29th, 2020

    Here’s a Joe Rogan interview with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, co-author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, talking about the battle against the Wuhan coronavirus. It’s informative but not exactly encouraging:

  • People with underlying conditions or risk factors like smoking or obesity suffer much higher death rates. 10% of Chinese men over 70 who smoked who contracted the Wuhan coronavirus died.
  • Don’t expect coronavirus to go away in short order; we’re going to be dealing with it for a while.
  • Don’t expect summer to kill the virus; MERS thrived on the Saudi Arabian peninsula.
  • It could be ten times worse than a seasonal flu.
  • Keep doing the hand washing, but don’t think it’s going to stop the virus, whose transmission vector is primarily airborne.
  • N-95 masks are effective, but there’s a shortage.
  • Fecal transplants > Probiotics.
  • There are coyotes in New York City’s Central Park.
  • It’s easy to make a cornavirus, but it’s hard to make a safe vaccine. It could be years before we have a vaccine…

    • Also features discussion of various other diseases.

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    What’s Going On In China?

    March 28th, 2020

    Yesterday’s LinkSwarm included a good bit of reporting on Communist China’s Coronavirus perfidy, both in covering it up and exporting it to the world. But what’s going on inside China right now? Everyone outside of the Democratic Party and the MSM (but I repeat myself) doesn’t believe for a second that China has actually controlled the outbreak the way their obviously fake figures suggest.

    There’s an awful lot of countervailing evidence that the outbreak there hasn’t been contained the ways China’s phony baloney numbers would have us believe:

  • The Chinese Communist Party has shut down all movie theaters again, just two weeks after giving them the greenlight to reopen.
  • “China has reported 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one funeral home received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days.”
  • We tend to think the Chinese communists have a lid on the anger and resentment of their own people, but recently stories have surfaced out of Hubei that indicate that’s not the case:

    Residents of Hubei province in China teamed up with their local police force to battle the police from neighboring Jiangxi province – who set up a roadblock on the Yangtze River Bridge to prevent the people of Hubei from crossing and returning to work.

    Footage of Hubei residents overturning Jingxi police vehicles was captured and uploaded to Chinese social media – where Chinese authorities have reportedly already scrubbed it.

  • So how are the Uighurs faring during the pandemic? Not well:

    The Chinese government has subjected tens millions of its citizens to draconian restrictions to try to contain the coronavirus. But for millions of Uighur and other ethnic minorities who were already living under severe repression, Beijing’s cruel and thuggish response to the pandemic is now compounding their anguish and pain.

    In Xinjiang, in China’s northwest, millions of people already have plenty of experience with the police state mentality. Over 1 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are currently imprisoned in “re-education camps,” where they are deprived of basic freedoms, religious practice, contact with their families or any legal recourse whatsoever. Those camps are especially vulnerable to contagious disease due to the cramped cells, lack of medical resources and generally dire conditions.

    Now Uighur activists are presenting evidence that the Chinese authorities’ reaction to the epidemic is causing hunger and panic even outside the camps. There are also separate reports that the Chinese authorities are forcing Uighurs to return to work at factories that had been shut down because of the epidemic — despite the ongoing risks.

    The Uyghur Human Rights Project released a briefing Wednesday that included Uighur-language videos and social media posts about the dire conditions in Xinjiang. The videos, which could not be independently verified, show Uighurs confronting a desperate shortage of food. The group says its claims are corroborated by news reports and messages members of the Uighur diaspora have received from family and friends in recent weeks.

    • The “terror famine” is an old play in the Communist Oppression Handbook, used everywhere from the Ukraine Holodomor to the tens of millions killed in Mao’s own collectivization famine.

    Keep in mind that most observers in the west didn’t have a good idea what was actually going on in the interior of China before the cornonavirus outbreak, and there’s little reason to believe that the fragments of social media flotsam and jetsam that make it to us are presenting an accurate or complete picture of it now.

    It’s widely believed that Wuhan coronavirus infection and death figures are understated by a factor of 10-20. But what if even that is too low?

    What if it killed fifty times as many Chinese people as their government claims?

    What if it killed a hundred times more?

    How would we know?

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