THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: Joe Biden Says He’d Reverse Trump’s Decision To Defund The WHO Despite Coronavirus Errors.
Earlier: “Joe Biden stands up for China:”
Archive for 2020
April 29, 2020
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Joe Biden Tosses More Word Salad; About to Get Tossed by DNC?
“What does Joe Biden have in common with Joe Pesci in Goodfellas?” is the kind of question only VodkaPundit readers can expect to have asked — and answered.
THIS IS NOT MY SHOCKED FACE: Woman who blamed Trump after giving husband fish tank cleaner now under investigation for murder.
CHANGE: A Farewell to Marine Tanks? “Evidently the Marine Corps is going to shed all its tank units over the next decade.”
The Corps is moving to a “distributed lethality” model of smaller, more mobile, higher-tech units acting to support Navy actions across the Pacific.
BENEFICIAL ONES, OF COURSE. Drinking coffee appears to cause epigenetic changes to your DNA.
I’M EXPECTING AN ASTEROID-SHATTERING KABOOM: Why NASA plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid.
SEX, ART AND MONEY: Corrupted by Commerce? Does putting a price on the good things in life corrupt our appreciation of them? Not according to the prostitutes and art dealers studied by Stanford’s Steve Clowney.
OPENING THE ECONOMY — AND THE STREETS: A Plan for Ending New York’s Shutdown. Arpit Gupta suggests starting by bringing people under 45 back to work. He also proposes closing a lot of streets to give pedestrians more room for social distancing, which strikes me as a good idea. Even though I often drive in Manhattan and am a devout defender of the automobile everywhere else in America, I think New York has given away too much valuable space to cars, and there’s no need to keep doing it with traffic so much lighter these days.
NEWS FROM MY NECK OF THE WOODS: Coronavirus in Tennessee: 22 active cases in Knox County, 224 total. “The Knox County Health Department reported three new cases on Wednesday, bringing the total case number to 224. Knox County reported 22 active cases on Wednesday, up one from 21 on Tuesday. The total number of recovered cases grew to 197 from 195. Recovered cases refer to those who have been released from isolation after seven days from their onset of symptoms, plus 72 hours of being symptom-free. Three cases currently require hospitalization after six were hospitalized as of Monday. Of the 224 cases, 34 of them have resulted in hospitalization at any point during the illness.”
COLLECTIVISTS GOTTA COLLECTIVIZE: Hillary Clinton on Coronavirus and Universal Health Care: ‘This Would Be a Terrible Crisis to Waste.’
I MENTIONED THIS PROSPECT THE OTHER DAY: People Are Now Hoarding a Heartburn Drug Researched as Potential COVID-19 Treatment.
Solution: Just get Trump to praise it. Press will report that Trump says heartburn causes Covid-19. Problem solved.
THE BLOOD ON DE BLASIO’S HANDS:
Stop twisting yourselves into pretzels of befuddlement and shocked-shocked confusion about the mayor’s actions. If it walks like a worse-than-useless bigot and talks like a worse-than-useless bigot and tweets like a worse-than-useless bigot, I’ve got news for you: It’s not the effective and tolerant mayor of a great city. De Blasio might’ve been capitalizing on the behavior of a few Hasidic Jews when he railed against “the Jewish community” at large, but anti-Semitism doesn’t differentiate between those in long beards and black hats and Jews who are clean shaven and bare headed. In singling out the Jews for spreading the virus, the mayor was targeting all of us, making us all less safe.
Bill de Blasio is responsible for the thousands of deaths from COVID-19 he could’ve prevented by doing his job, and he is also responsible for the lives he continues to put in danger—the millions of New Yorkers increasingly unsafe and uncared for, and the victims of the violence some of them will cause others because their own worst fears and biases have been stoked. Everyone will suffer, everyone will pay—everyone but the one man who caused it all.
Read the whole thing.
SHUTDOWN UPDATE: Food insecurity, hunger a growing issue amid COVID-19 pandemic.
TIMING: Deadline Looms On Iran Deal Just Before Election. “Snapback of Sanctions Is Being Eyed.”
Mr. Pompeo’s attempt to extend the arms embargo could fail, but then America just might get even more bold, using Resolution 2231’s self-destruct mechanism. Known as the “snapback” option, the resolution provided such a path to help the Obama administration sell it at home.
President Obama knew he had no way of turning his plan of action into a treaty. He couldn’t muster the necessary Senate majority to approve it. Instead, he took the deal to a much more sympathetic audience, the United Nations, where he inked it despite the fact that both houses of Congress were against it — overwhelmingly so in the opinion of the New York Times.
If Iran were ever to cheat on its obligations, promised top officials in the Obama administration, we’d at any time be able to end the deal and reimpose full sanctions. Further, they added, no one at the UN could stand in our way.
Hence the “snapback” mechanism that, according to the UN resolution, allows any of the original parties to the JCPOA to “reimpose unilateral and multilateral nuclear-related sanctions in the event of Iran non-performance,” as Secretary of State Kerry told the Senate at the time.
Further, and uniquely in the context of UN traditions, neither Russia nor Communist China nor any other Iran-friendly permanent member of the Security Council would be able to veto the snapback clauses, we were told.
Electing a Democrat president in November would mean letting the Mullahs back out of the box.
#JOURNALISM: Yahoo reporter apologizes to Trump after making false COVID test claim in Oval Office meeting. “A Yahoo reporter apologized to President Trump on Tuesday after falsely claiming South Korea has done five times more coronavirus tests than the Unites States per capita during an Oval Office meeting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.”
Hey, at least he admitted the error and apologized. So many of them just double down nowadays.
BLUE ANGELS AND THUNDERBIRDS SALUTE HEALTH CARE WORKERS AND FIRST RESPONDERS: The U.S. military’s elite flight demonstration squadrons overfly the New York City area, from Long Island to northern New Jersey. Photo taken April 28, 2020