HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, COLLUSION EDITION: Former Emory U. professor pleads guilty of hiding ties to Chinese government.
Archive for 2020
May 14, 2020
RICHARD GRENELL DROPS ANOTHER BOMBSHELL ON THE OBAMA ADMIN’S INVOLVEMENT IN SPYGATE: “In a new twist in SpyGate, Barack Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan, suppressed intelligence that Russia wanted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 election, according to information being declassified by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.”
THE COWARD OF THE COUNTY — BUT WITH A SWEET UNACCOUNTABLE PUBLIC UNION JOB:
Remember: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Or maybe out in the parking lot, hiding behind their cars like a little, highly-paid weasel.
UPDATE: So a couple of commenters think I’m being too hard on this guy, noting that you never know how you’ll act in a situation like this until it happens. Well, okay, but I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts he strutted around like a hero before. And I’m supposed to give up the right to protect myself in favor of relying on guys who, if they chicken out and let me die, get reinstated with full pay and benefits afterward? Screw that. And while maybe nobody knows what they’ll do in a crisis, it wasn’t a crisis when he maneuvered to get his job and back pay instead of hanging his head in shame at his shameful failure. And the union that supported him here is garbage, and further illustrates why public employee unions should be banned.
BUT THE NARRATIVE: 38% rise in bleach poisoning predates Trump’s suggestion, data shows.
SEA CHANGE: United against China: College Dems join College Republicans in demand to close ALL Chinese ‘propaganda’ centers on campus. Used to be a communist country could count on support from Democratic college students.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Richard Grenell Is the Superhero America Needs Right Now. “All the while Hillary Clinton was burping up box chardonnay and warning people that the Republicans were going to dismiss the results of the election the Democrats were working on a way to do just that.”
COMMUNIST CHINA STEALING AMERICAN CREATIVITY – MEDICAL RESEARCH EDITION:
In mid-April, a senior FBI official warned that cyber spies were attacking U.S. and allied medical research institutions developing coronavirus vaccines. The U.S. Department of Justice later pegged China as the chief witch doctor of medical espionage and suggested a crash American COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine project nicknamed Operation Warp Speed is Beijing’s major target.
More information broke on this yesterday. However, the facts were already appearing a month ago. A vaccine is a powerful tool, in so many ways.
…the nation that develops and deploys the first safe and clinically effective vaccine will be able to do many things. Protecting your nation’s population is more than a material medical advantage. A vaccinated population has an economic advantage over adversaries.
Developing an effective vaccine enhances diplomatic power. Obviously, the discoverer’s allies are in line to benefit. But don’t underestimate prestige power of an effective vaccine’s quick discovery and rapid employment. Effectiveness is primary. However, speed demonstrates a society’s ability to rapidly face new, threatening conditions and produce a response that benefits the world.
A Nobel Prize isn’t the only measure of a nation’s creative scientific vitality, but it is a measure even television gab shows understand. Hence this column’s side bet: An effective COVID-19/Wuhan virus vaccine developed by fall 2020 will warrant a Nobel Prize in Medicine.
So Communist China wants to steal the fruits of our scientific genius.
MICHAEL BARONE CALLED IT “GANGSTER GOVERNMENT” FOR A REASON: How Obama Administration shattered rule of law.
This week, former President Obama re-emerged from hibernation to lecture Americans about the threat to rule of law posed by the Trump administration. After Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the Department of Justice would be dropping its case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, Obama told his former aides, “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.” He explained, “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. … And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
In reality, of course, Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with lying to the FBI in the course of an investigation, a separate and far lesser offense, particularly given the fact that his alleged lie was immaterial to any underlying crime. In fact, as America found out over the past two weeks, Flynn wasn’t supposed to be the subject of any investigation at all: The FBI had decided to close an investigation into Flynn in January 2017, even after supposedly nefarious calls between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok — the same man who pledged to lover and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that Donald Trump would never be president and suggested an “insurance policy” against that possibility — then intervened to keep the investigation open.
The next day, during an Oval Office meeting, President Obama himself asked then-FBI Director James Comey about the Flynn-Kislyak communications. Next, Comey upped the ante: He avoided following normal FBI-White House protocols in order to interview Flynn, and Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, avoided informing Flynn of his rights. Nonetheless, the FBI agents who conducted the interview suggested that they did not think Flynn was lying during that interview. As it turns out, notes between top FBI officials at the time said, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn would later plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI — at least in part because the FBI was threatening his son with prosecution.
This should be a massive scandal. It should be a massive scandal because, at the very least, it demonstrates the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies, prompted by political actors at the very top of the government, racing to bend the rules in order to pursue a case they were convinced they would make: the case that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government. From the purposefully botched Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to the absurdly conjured prosecution of Flynn, the most powerful institutions in American life violated the protocols meant to restrict abuse, firmly secure in their own feelings of moral rectitude.
That’s the best-case scenario.
The worst-case scenario is far darker: that by early January, with no evidence of Russian collusion, leaders of the nation’s political and law enforcement agencies decided that guilt was irrelevant, and that the Trump administration had to be strangled in the crib.
Yeah, I’m not buying the best case.
OH FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: The Limits of Anthony Fauci’s Expertise. “The government disease doctor acknowledges he isn’t studying shutdown trade-offs.”
Does Dr. Fauci still regard life under lockdown as merely “inconvenient”? Of course economics is not his field, but presumably as a U.S. citizen he has noticed the gargantuan impact of the government response to the virus.
Yet there he was again yesterday on television encouraging more of the same as he remotely addressed a Senate hearing. “Dr. Anthony Fauci warns senators of ‘suffering and death’ if states reopen too early,” says a CNBC headline.
“Fauci warns that ‘consequences could be really serious’ if states move too quickly to reopen,” announces the Washington Post.
It’s important to understand that Dr. Fauci is only focused on one set of consequences, and it’s not clear he’s analyzing them correctly. Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who is also a medical doctor, challenged Dr. Fauci’s views specifically on the risks posed by Covid-19, as well as the disease expert’s central role in the federal response.
Dr. Paul noted that for young people, the virus has caused very low mortality, that many Covid-19 forecasts have proven to be wrong and that places like Sweden that have avoided strict lockdowns are doing better than many shuttered areas.
RELATED, FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: The economic devastation wrought by the pandemic could ultimately kill more people than the virus itself.
You know what else kills? Poverty and despair.
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Questions Looking for Answers: Judge Sullivan and General Flynn.
UH, NORTHEASTERN DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS MOSTLY? Who sent coronavirus-positive patients into nursing homes?
The great influenza of 1918-19, for example, tended to kill otherwise healthy people in the prime of life, ages 20 to 40. The COVID-19 virus tends to kill people age 70 and above, especially those with comorbidities.
Yet, even though that was apparent early on, America’s governors have done a poor job of protecting those most at risk — residents of nursing homes, elderly people with physical frailties and, often, cognitive impairment.
The result: One-third of reported coronavirus deaths in the United States, according to the New York Times’s reporting, are of nursing home residents or workers. And nursing homes accounted for a majority of deaths in heavily hit states, such as New Jersey (52%), Massachusetts (59%), Pennsylvania (66%), and Connecticut (55%), and for 80% of deaths in otherwise lightly hit Minnesota.
That percentage is much lower (20%) in America’s COVID-19 epicenter, New York, but the Empire State still leads the nation with 5,403 nursing home deaths — about 1 out of every 14 COVID-19 deaths in the entire country.
Why so many? On March 25, the state health commissioner ordered nursing homes to accept patients with the virus. It’s unclear why he made this fatal decision. Maybe he wanted to keep hospital beds available. Or maybe he feared that sick people would be dumped onto the street.
When asked about this policy in late April, Gov. Andrew Cuomo professed ignorance. Two weeks later, on Saturday, after 46 days in effect, he reversed it.
New York wasn’t the only state that insisted on placing infected patients in nursing homes. New Jersey’s policy was similar, explicitly barring homes from requiring testing before admitting patients. California had the same policy but dropped it after 10 days.
Other states, recognizing the dangers of infecting the vulnerable, required or encouraged nursing homes to set up separate units or staffs to handle patients testing positive. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely criticized in the national media for avoiding a total lockdown, zeroed in on nursing homes, encouraging repeated testing and temperature-taking of residents and staff and isolating anyone testing positive. Florida, a state with 2 million more people than New York, had just 714 nursing home deaths, 13% of the number in New York.
This will not be widely emphasized by the press.
FBI REPORTEDLY SERVES WARRANT ON GOP SEN. RICHARD BURR, SEIZES PHONE: “The actions represent a major escalation in the probe of stock trades made by several senators who made the trades in the days surrounding secret February briefings warning of a potentially catastrophic epidemic but before the stock market began crashing.”
JON CALDARA: Earning a living is the new civil disobedience.
The American Dream is created via an elusive mixture of insanely hard work, intelligence and colossal personal risk. Jennifer and her husband took on that challenge to start their dream. They mortgaged their home, emptied their savings and pulled money from their retirement funds to create Water’s Edge Winery and Bistro located at 2102 E Arapahoe Road in Centennial.
After five grueling years their business was a success, employing many people, allowing those folks to pay their own rents and the taxes to support others without work.
When her restaurant was shut down Jennifer re-organized to provide pick-up food service. She found that while people were waiting for their meal orders to be cooked, they wanted to have a glass of wine. The place is a winery after all.
Who would have guessed this would become the beginning of a law-breaking demonstration of resistance? Forget the Tea Party of 1773. This is the Wine Party of 2020.
Rread the whole thing.
IT’S NOT A CRISIS, IT’S AN EXCUSE: Pelosi Bill Aims to Fight Coronavirus With Hate Crime Reform and ‘Environmental Justice Grants.’
NOT IF IT REFLECTS BADLY ON DEMOCRATS IT ISN’T: Some States Forced Nursing Homes To Accept Coronavirus Patients. Many Died As A Result. This Is A Massive Scandal.
AS DEMOCRATS DO: Rand Paul: “Vice President Biden Is Guilty Of Using Government To Go After A Political Opponent.”
Sen. Rand Paul called for acting Director of National Intelligence Rick Grenell to testify about a list of Obama administration officials, including Obama and Biden, involved in the “unmasking” of then-incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications after the 2016 election.
Speaking to members of the press, Paul also said he wanted testimony from the officials on the list, including James Comey and James Clapper.
“These rumors have been going around for years that Obama’s administration was abusing te power of unmasking, and this sounds like they were using it to go after a political opponent, which is a serious offense and should be investigated,” Paul said. “The fact that Vice President Biden is directly involved in the unmasking of a political opponent — think about it. You remember impeachment? They said the president was using the government to go after a political opponent? This is Vice President Biden using the spying powers of the U.S. to go after a political opponent and he is caught red-handed here… eavesdropping on a political opponent’s phone calls.”
“Every reporter in the country needs to ask this legitimate question. They need to come out of hibernation and ask Vice President Biden, do we think it is a legitimate function of government to eavesdrop on political opponents, illegally unmask them and listen to their private conversation?”
“This is exactly what they were accusing President Trump of — he was acquitted on those charges. They have now found that Vice President Biden is guilty of using government to go after a political opponent.”
Another torpedo circles around.
BY WHETHER IT FITS THE CURRENT NARRATIVE, OF COURSE: How can Twitter decide whether COVID news is ‘untrue’? Even the scientists aren’t sure.
AT AMAZON, Face Mask, Pack of 50.
SHOCK: WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT ‘NUKED THE LOCKDOWNS,’ BUSINESSES CAN REOPEN. “While the Journal-Sentinel claimed that the court ‘struck down Gov. Tony Evers’ order,’ the very first line of the opinion, written by Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, contradicts this claim. ‘This case is about the assertion of power by one unelected official, Andrea Palm, and her order to all people within Wisconsin to remain in their homes, not to travel and to close all businesses that she declares are not ‘essential’ in Emergency Order 28. Palm says that failure to obey Order 28 subjects the transgressor to imprisonment for 30 days, a $250 fine or both. This case is not about Governor Tony Evers’ Emergency Order or the powers of the Governor,’ Roggensack argues.”