THERE WAS A TIME THERE I HOPED HE’D GROW A SPINE: Lindsey Graham Supports Liz Cheney.
Archive for 2021
February 3, 2021
YEAH. TALKING ABOUT CANCEL CULTURE IS…. WRONG? Newsmax Host Walks-Off Set During Segment With Mike Lindell.
PEOPLE WHO KNOW HER PERSONALLY TOLD ME SHE’S…. NOT SMART: Land Mines In West Virginia For Kamala Harris.
GOOD. EVERYTHING GOOD RANKLES LIBERALS: Fundraising By Trump Rankles Liberals.
And honestly, I’m getting to where I find rankling them a net good.
February 2, 2021
NOW OUT FROM ANDY NGO: Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
My copy came today.
AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Harrison Ford, Sam Elliott, Martin Sheen, Mark Hamill Narrated Lincoln Project Political Ads.
There’s no proof that any of these actors knew the alleged sordid background of the Lincoln Project’s founder, but in retrospect, their involvement is, unfortunately, awfully on-brand for Hollywood: Hollywood Is a Sex-Grooming Gang.
REP. SCALISE SLAMS PELOSI: She’s Painting GOP As The Enemy So She Can Take Away Gun Rights.
Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.
RED LINE FEVER: Leveraging Corrupt Media, China Draws a Red Line for Biden Administration
February 2021 reprises a red-line drama, not yet as tragedy and not as farce but definitely as a threat to world peace. The repetition tests the will of President Joe Biden’s administration to defend American security and a common-sense understanding of human freedom.
On Feb. 1, communist China’s top foreign policy guru, Yang Jiechi, gave a speech to a virtual audience hosted by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Yang reportedly told his audience, “The United States should stop interfering in Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang” — western China where Uighurs live — “and other issues.” Yang said these three regions are Chinese “internal affairs.”
Then Yang added the most nuanced phrase: “They” — the so-called internal affairs — “constitute a red line that must not be crossed. Any trespassing would end up undermining China-U.S. relations, and the United States’ own interests.”
“Red line” meaning China’s rules.
RTWDT. Acronym for Read The Whole Damn Thing.
JOHN HINDERAKER: How to Strike Back Against Big Tech Censorship.
OPEN THREAD: What are you doing to help?
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Gay Penguins Steal Entire Nest From Lesbian Penguins to Become Dads.
KAYLEIGH MCENANY HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Biden White House asking reporters to share questions in advance of briefings: Report.
Jen Psaki will circle back on this issue, I’m sure.
CNN’S RATINGS FREE-FALL IN BIDEN’S FIRST WEEK; NETWORK’S PRIME-TIME SHOWS DROP 44%:
CNN’s first week in a post-Trump world was painful for its prime-time hosts.
Analysis by Variety of two key metrics raises ratings red flags for network bosses.
“Viewership data across two key metrics — the target news demographic for people ages 25-54, and the total audience watching — shows that CNN ended the final week of January with ratings dropping roughly 44% for total audience versus the prior week across all three hours of primetime,” the entertainment magazine reported Monday.
CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time” metrics with viewers 25-54 fell “by more than half” (1.38 million to .45 in the key demographic).
The development appears to lend credence to predictions by journalist Megyn Kelly, among many others, that former President Trump in many ways was a ratings life raft for cable news pundits.
Including: CNN Fires Fake-Conservative-Who-Only-Attacks-Conservatives Matt Lewis.
Related: Iowahawk gleefully rubs salt into media’s wounds after CNN’s post-Trump ratings take a nosedive.
HOW’S THAT DEFUNDING THE POLICE WORKING OUT FOR YOU? Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike. Progressive politicians and journalists are pretending the nationwide surge in shootings and murders was due to the pandemic, as in this ridiculous NPR report. But numbers don’t lie. The spike was clearly due to the decline in “proactive policing,” which was caused by the war on cops that started with the George Floyd protests.
BANKRUPTCY IN..3..2..1: Live Nation Sues Insurance Company for Not Covering COVID-19 Claims.
Live Nation is the latest company to join a growing group who say that Rhode Island-based insurer Factory Mutual has failed to pay out claims on its Global Advantage All-Risk property insurance policy. The touring giant purchased the policy “at significant expense” on June 1, 2019, for coverage through June 1, 2020, states the filing, submitted by Live Nation’s outside counsel Marc D. Halpern. The policy “specifically designates communicable disease as a covered cause of loss.”
Live Nation claims COVID-19 outbreaks affected 35 company locations, infecting 62 of its employees during the first months of the pandemic, and cites “an unprecedented and nearly complete shut-down of the live music industry” that has cost the promoter billions of dollars in losses.
At issue is the Global Advantage policy’s property damage section, which Live Nation claims is “meant to protect the insured against all risks of loss, whether known or unknown” with enhancements added to the coverage protecting “against loss of income following a disaster, wherever you operate, or however indirect your connection to the loss.” (A copy of the policy was not included in the lawsuit.) The suit notes that while many outside All-Risk policies don’t cover “pathogens, viruses or other disease-causing agents,” the FM policy “expressly includes ‘Communicable Disease’ as a covered cause of loss.”
Other companies currently suing Factory Mutual include Ralph Lauren, Cinemark, New York University and the Atlanta Falcons — all similarly claiming the insurer failed to pay out claims for pandemic-related financial losses.
Read the whole thing.
THE NEW URBAN FLIGHT: Remotely Competitive. As workers abandon office buildings in New York and San Francisco, they’re collecting relocation bonuses from small cities and moving into apartment buildings designed as “remote work hubs.”
21ST CENTURY POLITICS: Elites who have it easy want everyone else to stop complaining.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Jeff Bezos Announces He Will Step Down From Amazon To Focus On Being A Bond Villain.
DISPATCHES FROM THE LOWER EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Secretary of Ethnic Studies. President Biden’s choice to lead the Education Department has a thin record—except in one trailblazing area.
‘THEIR GOAL IS TO DESTROY EVERYONE:’ Uighur camp detainees allege systematic rape.
First-hand accounts from inside the internment camps are rare, but several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organised system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.
Tursunay Ziawudun, who fled Xinjiang after her release and is now in the US, said women were removed from the cells “every night” and raped by one or more masked Chinese men. She said she was tortured and later gang-raped on three occasions, each time by two or three men.
Ziawudun has spoken to the media before, but only from Kazakhstan, where she “lived in constant fear of being sent back to China”, she said. She said she believed that if she revealed the extent of the sexual abuse she had experienced and seen, and was returned to Xinjiang, she would be punished more harshly than before. And she was ashamed, she said.
It is impossible to verify Ziawudun’s account completely because of the severe restrictions China places on reporters in the country, but travel documents and immigration records she provided to the BBC corroborate the timeline of her story. Her descriptions of the camp in Xinyuan county – known in Uighur as Kunes county – match satellite imagery analysed by the BBC, and her descriptions of daily life inside the camp, as well as the nature and methods of the abuse, correspond with other accounts from former detainees.
Flashback to Tom Cotton, last year: Joe Biden Is China’s Choice for President.
DISPATCHES FROM GOYA’S DECEMBER EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: AOC’s body politics.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger to attention. The second-term congresswoman was the second most talked-about politician in 2019, just behind then-President Donald Trump. AOC loves to frequently jump on livestream videos to talk directly to her fans and voters, whether while she’s making macaroni, building furniture, or playing a wildly popular multiplayer game. It was during one of these Instagram livestreams on Monday night that she committed perhaps her gravest sin yet as a politician.
AOC, who has somehow not yet dried the well of public sympathy for the January 6 storming of the Capitol, linked the experience to an alleged sexual assault she suffered in the past:
‘The reason I’m getting emotional in this moment is because these folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize — these are the same tactics of abusers. And I’m a survivor of sexual assault and I haven’t told many people that in my life, but when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.’
This is gross manipulation, and AOC should be ashamed. Not for sharing that she was sexually assaulted — I have no way of knowing whether or not her story is true and, ultimately, it’s irrelevant to the issue of the storming of the Capitol. The real story here is that AOC used her alleged trauma as a cudgel against her political opponents. She has weaponized her alleged experience to silence anyone who criticizes her and even went so far as to compare them to the person or people who abused her. This type of behavior cheapens sexual assault.
Meanwhile, Jim Treacher demands that: The Capitol Police Must Investigate the Officer Who Allegedly Threatened AOC.
During the riot at the Capitol Building on January 6, a Capitol Police officer named Brian Sicknick was murdered. His killer remains at large. Dozens of other officers were injured, some seriously. One officer, Eugene Goodman, led rioters away from Mike Pence as they chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Two other officers have subsequently committed suicide. The Capitol Police put their bodies on the line that day, and without them the riot would’ve been even worse. But more importantly, one of those officers really scared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and she told the world about it last night on Instagram Live.
But leave it to America’s Newspaper of Record to blow the lid off this story: AOC Claims Two Men In MAGA Hats Threw Economics Textbooks At Her.
Now it all makes sense.
“GAIN OF FUNCTION” RESEARCH IS TERRIBLE AND SHOULD BE BANNED: US officials revisit rules for disclosing risky disease experiments: An expert panel is considering how much to reveal about a largely secret review process of ‘gain-of-function’ research.
Of course, a counterargument is that the U.S. ban just drove research — even research funded by the U.S. — overseas to Wuhan, where standards were slipshod.
Back in October 2014, the US government had placed a federal moratorium on gain-of-function (GOF) research – altering natural pathogens to make them more deadly and infectious – as a result of rising fears about a possible pandemic caused by an accidental or deliberate release of these genetically engineered monster germs.
This was in part due to lab accidents at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in July 2014 that raised questions about biosafety at US high-containment labs.
At that time, the CDC had closed two labs and halted some biological shipments in the wake of several incidents in which highly pathogenic microbes were mishandled by US government laboratories: an accidental shipment of live anthrax, the discovery of forgotten live smallpox samples and a newly revealed incident in which a dangerous influenza strain was accidentally shipped from the CDC to another lab.
A CDC internal report described how scientists failed to follow proper procedures to ensure samples were inactivated before they left the lab, and also found “multiple other problems” with operating procedures in the anthrax lab.
As such in October 2014, because of public health concerns, the US government banned all federal funding on efforts to weaponize three viruses – influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
In the face of a moratorium in the US, Dr Anthony Fauci – the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and currently the leading doctor in the US Coronavirus Task Force – outsourced in 2015 the GOF research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving US government funding.
The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.
Worth remembering Fauci’s role here, which has gotten little attention.