SHERIFFS HAVE DISCRETION, TOO, AND IT’S GOING VIRAL: “If you elect a sheriff, they get to play the independent mandate “I’m a check against tyranny” card like every other elected government officeholder. And some are.”

Read the whole thing.

HELP WANTED: If you are a conservative or libertarian lawyer with a strong interest in civil rights law, click here. Yes, this is a paying job.

(If you have a long memory, you may recall that I wrote a similar post back in the summer. For reasons having to do with the inefficiency of the federal government in dealing with personnel issues, the current very capable incumbent was not able to start a new job until now. I am therefore starting the process all over again.)

AXIOS BAILOUT: Why are Steve Jobs’s billionaire widow and Comcast asking taxpayers to foot the bill?

NEW EVIDENCE SUPPORTING CREDIBILITY OF TARA READE’S ALLEGATION AGAINST JOE BIDEN EMERGES:

On August 11, 1993, King aired a program titled, “Washington: The Cruelest City on Earth?” Toward the end of the program, he introduces a caller dialing in from San Luis Obispo, California. Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

CALLER: That’s true.

King’s panel of guests offered no suggestions, and instead the conversation veered into a discussion of whether any of the men on set would leak damaging personal information about a rival to the press. 

And thanks to the Media Research Center’s apparently Raiders of the Lost Ark-sized warehouse full of archives of the last three decades of the DNC-MSM, there’s video of the above conversation: Shock Video: Is This the Mom of Biden’s Accuser Talking to CNN in ’93?

As Megan McArdle tweets, “If this holds up, there will be more contemporaneous evidence for Tara Reade’s accusations against Joe Biden than for Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh.”

Related: Dems Rush To Defend Kavanaugh After He Puts On Joe Biden Mask.

From – of course – America’s Newspaper of Record.

NEVER LET A PANDEMIC GO TO WASTE: Biden: Coronavirus Is a ‘Wake Up Call’ on ‘Climate Change,’ an ‘Opportunity’ for ‘Institutional Change.’

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Scab and the Wound Beneath: On painful realities in the age of the coronavirus. “The pernicious coronavirus tore off an American scab and revealed suppurating wounds beneath. Take the central actor of this plague, China. For much of the twenty-first century, the American establishment’s foreign policy toward China, to the degree it was even formalized, was ethically and logically bankrupt. Yet the status quo remained unquestioned, given it rested on a rare alignment of both progressive and commercial self-interests. . . . Chinese money has been far more influential in warping American politics than were the supposedly colluding Russians who ran some Facebook ads to stir up chaos in 2016 and may have spent a few million dollars in salting misinformation. By the time the virus abates, there may indeed be Chinese ‘collusion’ in this election year, as the media and the Left parrot the Chinese Communist Party’s conspiracy theories and fantasies about the virus, ones deemed mutually efficacious in ensuring that the purported Sinophobe Donald Trump is not reelected. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that the Chinese communists and the American Left hate Trump equally.”

We need to start vigorously enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

1 IN 5 CORONAVIRUS DEATHS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED BY SECURING NURSING HOMES.

PINK COMMIES BEND OVER FOR RED COMMIES: Pressured by China, E.U. Softens Report on Covid-19 Disinformation: A revised report shows how Beijing reacts swiftly and effectively to tamp down Western criticism of its pandemic response.

Bowing to heavy pressure from Beijing, European Union officials softened their criticism of China this week in a report documenting how governments push disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to documents, emails and interviews.

Worried about the repercussions, European officials first delayed and then rewrote the document in ways that diluted the focus on China, a vital trading partner — taking a very different approach than the confrontational stance adopted by the Trump administration.

The initial European Union report, obtained by The New York Times, was not particularly strident: a routine roundup of publicly available information and news reports.

It cited Beijing’s efforts to curtail mentions of the virus’s origins in China, in part by blaming the United States for spreading the disease internationally. It noted that Beijing had criticized France as slow to respond to the pandemic and had pushed false accusations that French politicians used racist slurs against the head of the World Health Organization. The report also highlighted Russian efforts to promote false health information and sow distrust in Western institutions.

“China has continued to run a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic and improve its international image,” the initial report said. “Both overt and covert tactics have been observed.”

But China moved quickly to block the document’s release, and the European Union pulled back. The report had been on the verge of publication, until senior officials ordered revisions to soften the language.

“The Chinese are already threatening with reactions if the report comes out,” Lutz Güllner, a European Union diplomat, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday in an email seen by The Times.

The sentence about China’s “global disinformation” campaign was removed, as was any mention of the dispute between China and France. Other language was toned down.

War by other means.

Flashback: During all the Russia hacking hype, China is rising in influence: While Russia’s role in the 2016 election dominates the news, China’s spying and alarming influence within our borders is too little noticed.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: War Party.

Ice is a powerful magician and trained warrior. His day job, however, is political analyst, and it is once again election year.

Hopefully with fewer explosions and snipers than the last one, but in the Empire of the One, what sounds like a boring desk job is anything but.

Especially when al old flame gets pissed enough to jump into the presidential race.

Between assassins on the loose, duels to the death, and a sense of something nasty coming his way, Ice is going to be busy.

OR ANY MORE LOCKDOWNS. ALSO, BEE, YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO REPORT THE NEWS. LOOK UP SATIRE IN DICTIONARY:  Majority Of Americans Would Rather Risk COVID Death Than Endure Any More Skype Lectures From Celebrities.

WELL, THEN!  New Evidence Supporting Credibility of Tara Reade’s Allegation Against Joe Biden Emerges.

BUT BECAUSE OF VOTE-BY-FRAUD-MAIL COLORADO ISN’T:  Oklahoma governor announces businesses to reopen Friday.

I DON’T REMEMBER SIGNING UP FOR LIVING IN INTERESTING TIMES:  The Local is National, and Everything’s Political.

NO, NOR SHOULD THEY:  If Half the Country’s COVID Deaths Were in Montana, Would New York Shut Down?

I’LL POINT OUT WE TRIED TO GO TO THE PROTEST IN DENVER (LATE, BECAUSE IT’S US).  WE SAW PLENTY OF POLICE BARRICADES BLOCKING THE WAY (AND PEOPLE YOUNGER THAN US PARKING AND WALKING) BUT NOT A SINGLE HEALTH WORKER:  “Fake news”, caught in the act.

RUNNING AMERICA OFF THE CLIFF, LIKE NEANDERTHAL MEN WITH AN HERD OF BISON:  Lies, damned lies and journalism.

YOU CAN’T MAKE ENGINEERING WORK BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANT TO AND POLITICIANS THINK IT WOULD BE COOL:  ‘Green energy’ is a scam — as it always has been and likely ever shall be.

RARE AS THAT IS, THESE DAYS:  Constitution 1, California 0.

YES, THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE FICTION TOO:  Cataclysmic Feelings.

WHILE YOU WERE HIDING FOR FEAR OF WINNIE THE FLU:  One country, one system: The week that China shredded its promise on Hong Kong.

HEY, VICE, WUHAN IS NOT A RACE, AND WINNIE THE POOH IS MOCKING XI. NEWSFLASH, COMMUNIST IS ALSO NOT A RACE. NOR IS HORRENDOUS TOTALITARIAN DICTATOR A RACE:  These Racist ‘Wuhan Plague’ Plaques Are Popping Up Around Atlanta.

TWO DIFFERENT WAYS: 2 different ways of being an American; 2 different ways of being a human being.

Yesterday we published two seemingly unrelated news articles. Yet the story they tell when placed next to each other and viewed in the same gaze with clear eyes is one every American should hear and ponder.

First, we reported on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The darling of the “just left of Marx” camp, in an interview with Vice, stated that once the economic lockdowns are lifted, Americans should simply refuse to go back to work. Here’s what she said:

“When we have this discussion about ‘going back’ or ‘reopening,’ I think a lot of people should just say, ‘No. We’re not going back to that. We’re not going back to 70 hour weeks just so we could put food on the table and not even feel any semblance of security in our lives.'”
Americans should refuse to go back to work, she says. “No. We’re not going back to that,” we should say.

Back to what? To the greatest and most prosperous economic times humans have ever known. The highest wages and the lowest unemployment for all groups. Companies fighting each other to pay people more for their skills and services. The least amount of financial suffering of our lifetimes. An economic situation that should have caused any of us with a modicum of self-awareness, knowledge of history, and honor to say out loud every day, “Thank you, God, for this time in which I live.”

That’s what AOC says we should refuse to go back to. The best we’ve ever had it. Because it wasn’t enough. The government should be giving us more, more, more — without us having to lift a finger. We deserve it. We are entitled to it.

That’s one way of being an American.

Next, we reported on factory workers at a company called Braskem America in Pennsylvania. More than 40 employees made the collective decision in March to leave their families and live at the factory for 28 days, where they would eat, sleep, and take turns working 12-hour shifts to produce protective equipment for healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. They clocked out yesterday after their month-long shift.

I couldn’t help but notice that every one of these workers appears to be male (extremely problematic lack of gender equity!). And may I hazard a guess that most of these men were raised to be men.

They lived in a factory. For a month. Doing factory work in 12-hour shifts. They agreed on it unanimously.

Well, to be fair, they’re not garbage people.

I RECOMMEND PRANK CALLS TO RECEP ERDOGAN: Here’s How LA’s Armenian Community Is Remembering The Genocide During Coronavirus.