THAT’S WHAT XI SAID! NY Gov. Hochul met with Chinese official who called genocide of Uyghur Muslims ‘lies.’ Huang Ping said, ‘I see these centers as a campus rather than camps.’
Related: Uyghur women in China labor camps recall horror of rape, forced sterilization.
KAVANAUGH AND ROBERTS JOIN COURT’S LIBERALS IN UPHOLDING VACCINE MANDATE FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS. What must it be like to be on the side that never receives unpleasant surprise “defections” in highly politicized Supreme Court cases? I’ll never know myself, but it must feel freaking great.
MICHIGAN AUDIT TO SHOW ‘NEARLY 30%’ MORE COVID DEATHS TIED TO LONG-TERM CARE FACILITIES:
While the report itself won’t be revealed until Monday, the early release of Wednesday’s letter by the Department of Health and Human Services was a sign of the attention the findings will likely receive.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a key point of disagreement with GOP lawmakers, and legislators have been working to investigate the data at the center of the debate.
House Oversight Chairman Steve Johnson, R-Wayland, confirmed the 30% finding in a Wednesday evening interview.
“The 30% number is accurate, and it’s incredibly troubling,” Johnson said of the Auditor General’s finding.
Despite the above report, and similar headlines from New York State, other Democratic governors are employing the same strategy, to likely similar disastrous results: Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Connecticut is asking nursing homes to take in Covid-positive patients.
KATHLEEN BUHLE DIDN’T KILL HERSELF: Hunter Biden’s Ex-Wife to Release Tell-All Memoir.
REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS: Cop Who Killed Ashli Babbitt Was Cleared of Criminal Wrongdoing Without Interview.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, PAL: Manhattan DA Tries to Dodge Blowback After His Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Memo to Prosecutors Went Public.
OLD MAN YELLS AT CLOUD:
Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022
UPDATE: A friend comments: “What a great day! Biden loses in USSC, get panned on his GA speech and Sinema torpedoes the election bill.”
FLASHBACK: When Americans have more faith in the military than the political class, democracy is in trouble. On the bright side, thanks to Gen. Mark Milley and the Afghanistan debacle, faith in the military has dropped a lot.
LIVE AT 3:30PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest.
BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules on Vaccine Mandate. “The conclusion on the per curiam brief in favor of striking down the mandate concluded that OSHA’s powers are limited to regulating the workplace, yet COVID-19 affects more than just the workplace, which means that the pandemic falls outside of OSHA’s purview.”
RETURN OF THE ROBBER BARONS: Elizabeth Warren Blames High Food Prices on Grocery Chains’ ‘Record’ 1 Percent Profit Margins.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fall’s Final Enrollment Count Is In. Colleges Lost More Than 475,000 Students.
New data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center provides a somber final tally of total college enrollment in the fall of 2021: It dropped 2.7 percent from a year earlier, a decline of 476,100 students.
Undergraduate enrollment, which was down at every type of institution, slipped by 3.1 percent — or 465,318 students — from the fall of 2020. The total decline among undergraduates since the fall of 2019 — just before the pandemic hit — was more than a million students, the center said.
As colleges navigate their second full academic year of the pandemic — with some pivoting to online instruction as cases of Covid’s Omicron variant rise — undergraduates are “continuing to sit out in droves,” Doug Shapiro, the center’s executive director, said in a news release.
Probably wise.
I HOPE WE’RE NOT TOO MESSIANIC, OR A TRIFLE TOO SATANIC: A public school in Illinois is hosting an After School Satan Club.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: The feds’ booster push shows public-health decisions aren’t data-driven.
DOJ CHARGES OATH KEEPERS WITH ‘SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY:’ Interestingly, the DOJ announcement describes the charges with reference to the statute’s inclusion of efforts to oppose or delay execution of a law, not its reference “to conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them …” But watch, the MSM and the Schumer/Pelosi crowd will frame it rhetorically as if the defendants are being charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: “[Stacy] Abrams hasn’t specified what led her to bypass Biden’s event… Her decision triggered speculation… that she was avoiding the president’s souring approval ratings.”
Here’s the transcript of the event, with the text of the speeches given by Biden and Harris. Did anyone even mention the glorious victory of Georgia’s football team the day before? A tremendously uplifting event had occurred. It wasn’t political. It was special to Georgia.
But the Washingtonians descended upon the state with dramatic, racialized negativity. They insisted on setting the tone, their tone, and it wasn’t jubilation. And not one speaker mentioned football. How could they? It would spoil their message of joylessness. It would offer discordant evidence that Americans can come together, and life isn’t all about politics.
Democrats would hate that.
Plus, from the comments: “As for Biden, I see a lot of gas station ‘I did that’ stickers here. Sometimes I fill up twice a day.”
Plus: “They can’t remind anyone about Georgia football winning a National Championship lest people remember who led the last championship team. He’s running for Senate right now and he’s a Trump guy.”
And: “Wasn’t it the old Georgia Democrat senator Zell Miller who opined that Democrats had shrunk the their big tent to the size of a dunce cap?” I miss Zell.
PRINCE ANDREW STRIPPED OF MILITARY, ROYAL TITLES AMID SEXUAL ASSAULT CASE: Queen Elizabeth II agreed to the arrangement in the wake of Prince Andrew’s legal woes.
IT ISN’T JUST OMICRON, IT’S EVERYTHING: Biden’s Incompetent Response to Omicron Forces Democrats to Face Reality.
WAIT, I THOUGHT IT WAS DEADLY-POISONOUS FISH MEDICINE: Study finds hydroxychloroquine delays disability for least treatable form of multiple sclerosis.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Jobless Claims Unexpectedly Rise.
FIVE FOR FIGHTING’S JOHN ONDRASIK: YouTube ‘Only Censors Views Critical of One Worldview.’
RUY TEIXEIRA: The Democrats’ Voting Rights Chimera.
The Democratic focus in the new year has been on trying to pass some version of voting rights reform. President Biden went down to Georgia and put the effort in stark terms: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
Teixeira appropriately calls that sort of language “unhinged level of hyperbole.” How’s that playing out for them? Sinema to deliver a Senate floor “double down” against Biden’s filibuster attacks.
And she does: Sinema Deals Death Blow to Biden’s Final Push to Suspend Filibuster.
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