Archive for 2020

OCTOBER SURPRISE? Justice Dept. ready to charge Google with monopoly search practices.

Insiders expect the Justice Department to charge Google with violating antitrust laws this week, in what would be the biggest such action against a U.S. tech company in two decades. But questions still swirl around how broad and tight Justice’s case will be.

Why it matters: The suit against Google will focus on monopolistic behavior, but it’s also likely to be the last chance for the Trump Administration to act against the tech giants it blames for anti-conservative bias before an election that could oust it.

And they likely won’t be alone: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will be subpoenaed to testify on Post censorship.

All of which is because:

 

CORONAVIRUS: The America Lasters Face Europe’s Second Wave.

Europe has now surpassed the United States in daily coronavirus cases. That presents a challenge for the Democratic politicians and left-wing commentators who have, for the past several months, made unfavorable comparisons between the United States and Europe yet another arrow in their quiver to shoot at President Donald Trump and to illustrate the alleged superiority of European governance, health care systems, and social cohesion.

In early September, Joe Biden bemoaned the way Europe had outperformed the United States in its handling of the coronavirus. Speaking to a crowd in Wilmington, Del., Biden compared death tolls in the five largest European countries and the United States, asking, “Why weren’t we doing what needed to be done?”

Spain’s cases per person had, at the time, already surged past the United States; a few weeks later, France followed suit. Today, the United States and the European Union have the same number of cases per capita; Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom all report higher rates. Europe, it seems, wasn’t doing what needed to be done after all.

Don’t expect to hear anything about this from those who profess to follow the science and to venerate data. We expect them to ignore science that undermines their political objective—defeating Trump—and to keep insisting, against the evidence, that America has it worse.

To the America lasters, the coronavirus crisis is further proof that the United States is backward, incompetent, and inferior to Europe’s rational, technocratic, socialist paradise. To them, American lives lost to the deadly disease weren’t a tragedy—they were another opportunity to score points against Trump.

To be fair, everything for them is about scoring points against Trump.

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

OPEN THREAD: It’s there. It’s there for you. It’s what you want.

THE PRICE OF PANIC: Dr. Jay Richards of Catholic University sits down with Bill Walton to discuss the horrendous costs of and ludicrous justifications for the Great Coronavirus Pandemic Lockdown. Did you know we have actually endured two pandemics?

DO THE RICH BACK THE LEFT OR RIGHT? Some interesting back-of-an-envelope calculations by Capital Research Center’s Michael Hartmann.

CHARLES LIPSON: Behind the social-media blackout of Biden family corruption.

Seeing the Biden family’s corruption as part of this entrenched system is why the social-media censorship of that story should not be seen as a separate, stand-alone scandal. It is integral to understanding how the Swamp’s ecosystem operations, how it defines our politics.

The operation is visible in the New York Post exposé of Biden family corruption. The FBI has had those documents for months, so they should be either verified or discredited by now. Those findings, if they exist, have not leaked. If the emails are legitimate, they are bombshells. If they are false, they are worse than duds. They are a major disinformation campaign — an assault on our election — and we need to know who is behind it so we can hold them accountable.

Twitter and Facebook have prevented dissemination of the Post story on their platforms. The reason, they say, is that they have not substantiated it themselves. They decided to block all users, including members of Congress and the President’s press secretary, from sharing links to these published stories. Big Tech Knows Best.

Remember, this story was published by a major newspaper, a reputable one with a large circulation, subject to libel and defamation laws. Notice that the Biden presidential campaign has not denied the documents are authentic.

Read the whole thing.

THREE RUSSIA-GATE QUESTIONS REMAIN UNANSWERED: Capital Research Center’s Ken Braun sorts through the continuing flood of documents coming out in the Russia-gate scandal. Here’s the most interesting of the three queries (at least for me): Why is Hillary so invested in the Russia-gate conspiracy theory?