WELL, THAT’S THE GOAL: U.S. Democracy Could Be in Peril By Pelosi’s HR1.

The House has just passed a bill that would compel states to accept mailed-in votes for 15 days prior to and 10 days after Election Day; set up automatic and online voter registration; prohibit review of the eligibility of voters; compel acceptance of ballots cast in the wrong precincts; bar the removal of the ineligible voters from the rolls; permit ballot harvesting; ban any voter identification laws; consign to unelected officials the redrawing of congressional districts; infringe upon free speech by the imposition of “onerous legal and administrative burdens on candidates, civic groups, unions, and non-profit organizations”; and establish a disturbingly named “Commission to Protect Democratic Institutions” in order to end-run the courts.

The potential for gross abuse with these changes if they are enacted is too obvious to require elaboration. Any opposition to it is labeled “voter suppression.” If this bill is enacted, especially with the provision for a bare majority vote on any issue in the Senate, and the addition of two or four sure Democratic senators from Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia admitted as new states, the question of whether and to what extent the United States remains a government of laws and a genuine democracy will not be possible to answer affirmatively with any confidence.

Should this be enacted, it will be reasonable to regard the U.S. government as lacking in democratic legitimacy.

The part about prohibiting review of voter eligibility makes pretty clear what they’re after.

OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT: David Hogg’s Pillow Company Seems to Have Already Failed.

#JOURNALISM: NYT looks at nursing home covid deaths. Doesn’t mention Cuomo.

THE LEFT IS DENYING EVEN THE POSSIBILITY OF A LEGITIMATE OPPOSITION: Kentucky’s Berea College Hosts Event Calling ‘Trumpism’ a Form of Terrorism.

SPACE: SpaceX sets new booster reuse mark with Starlink launch.

STACEY MATTHEWS: In the battle of pandemic governors, DeSantis rises as Cuomo takes dramatic fall.

NONE DARE CALL THEM “KIDS IN CAGES:”

HMM: Study finds cancer cells may evade chemotherapy by going dormant.

BIDEN, HARRIS, PSAKI AND OTHER TOP STAFFERS AFRAID TO APPEAR IN SUNDAY NEWS SHOWS (Video).

SEEMS LIKELY, BUT WHAT’S THE WORLD — LEAVING ASIDE THE XIDEN ADMINISTRATION — GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Former US investigator: COVID-19 may have come from bioweapons research accident.

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Coronavirus Infection Leads to Immunity That’s Comparable to a Covid-19 Vaccine. “Though this study didn’t gauge how long the benefits of a prior infection last beyond 90 days, other lines of evidence suggest it takes a while to wane. For instance, Gandhi pointed to a paper in Science that found that immune cells triggered by SARS-CoV-2 remained in the body for at least eight months.”

Immunity to the prior SARS virus is still working 17 years later.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: Antisemitism is a Conspiracy Theory Against Meritocracy.

END OF AN ERA: Drew Brees announces his retirement from the NFL.

SPYING: It’s Time to Talk about Privacy and License-Plate Readers (Again).

I had a Popular Mechanics column on that a while back.

And here’s a related piece I wrote for Road & Track: Don’t Track Me Bro!

HOW IT STARTED:

Coronavirus: New Zealand brings in ‘world’s toughest border restrictions’ to fight outbreak.

—Sky News, one year ago today.

How it’s going:

It’s not just in the States where The Heroes of the Pandemic Become Its Villains.

FAUCI: Trump endorsing COVID-19 vaccine would be ‘game-changer.’

Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that it would be a “game-changer” for President Trump to encourage his supporters to get the jab — after a poll found many GOP voters indicated that they’re reluctant.

“I think it would make all the difference in the world. He’s a very wildly popular person among Republicans,” Fauci told anchor Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”

“If he came out and said, ‘Go and get vaccinated, it’s really important for your health. the health of your family, and the health of the country,’ it seems absolutely inevitable that the vast majority of people who are his close followers would listen to him.”

Well, here you go, I think: Trump hopes everyone ‘remembers’ him when they get their coronavirus vaccines.

Former President Donald Trump is seeking credit for the swift rollout of multiple coronavirus vaccines, saying if it wasn’t for him “you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best.”

“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” the ex-president said in a statement released by his office Wednesday evening. “I hope everyone remembers!”

I’m sure even anti-vaxxers like President Harris do. Flashback: Kamala Harris says she will be ‘first in line’ for a coronavirus vaccine if health experts approve it, but ‘if Donald Trump tells us we should take it, then I’m not taking it.’

Also from Fauci today:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Flashback: Fauci’s NIH funded controversial gain-of-function viral research at Wuhan lab to get around US ban on dangerous research.

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.

Fauci’s role here, though a matter of public record, has received surprisingly little comment.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Sarpy County woman found guilty of sexual assault of 2 boys, ages 12 and 13.

THE QUESTION ISN’T WHETHER THE BILL SUCKS. IT’S WHETHER THE SENATE REPUBLICANS WILL SHOW THE GUMPTION TO FIGHT IT 100%. H.R. 1 Is a Partisan Assault on American Democracy.

It would be an understatement to describe H.R. 1 as a radical assault on American democracy, federalism, and free speech. It is actually several radical left-wing wish lists stuffed into a single 791-page sausage casing. It would override hundreds of state laws governing the orderly conduct of elections, federalize control of voting and elections to a degree without precedent in American history, end two centuries of state power to draw congressional districts, turn the Federal Elections Commission into a partisan weapon, and massively burden political speech against the government while offering government handouts to congressional campaigns and campus activists. Merely to describe the bill is to damn it, and describing it is a Herculean task in itself.

At what point do we regard our political system as illegitimate? If this bill passes, we’ll be much closer to that point, if not past it?

CNBC: The California Tech Exodus.

Best to avoid Texas though. In addition to the feral hogs and the recent “neanderthal” order by Gov. Abbott to stop enforcing mask orders, ‘Douche’ father-of-seven sales exec who moved his family from California to Texas then BACK again is blasted for complaining about Austin’s ‘rude locals, bland culture, oppressive heat and Yelp’s bad food choices’ in scathing Op-Ed. “Alder described Texas with its lower income taxes as a ‘conservative dystopia’ and said he felt cramped – even though his house was twice the size.”

In any case, how’s that red state “Welcome Wagon” project coming along?

HMM: The machine learning supply chain can be sabotaged with bad training data. Well, we’ve already seen what can happen to the human learning supply chain when you let leftists get involved.

OUT ON A LIMB: Andrew Cuomo’s Scandals Are A Result Of His Lifetime Of Being A Spiteful Bully.

I’m so old, I can remember a year ago when Chris Cuomo called his brother the “Love Gov,” and Gov. Cuomo responded: “I am the Love Gov. I’m a cool dude in loose mood, you know that. I just say, let it go, just go with the flow, baby, you know. You can’t control anything, so don’t even try.”

That’s not creepy at all.

WELL, YES: Researchers: Backyard chickens pose ‘viral spillover’ threat.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “MeTV has started playing cartoons on Saturday morning, and when I say ‘cartoons,’ I mean the original gangsta Chuck Jones Looney Tunes good stuff. The real thing. You don’t even need to pay for it; it’s beamed straight through the air to an antenna on your TV for free, paid for by commercials just like the good ol’ days.”

“GAME CHANGER:” NGOs criticize Biden as he flies illegal migrants across Texas, dumps them in El Paso.

So, CBP is flying them across Texas to ease the overcrowding at the border, only to transport them back to Mexico, far away from where they entered. How is that a better idea than immediate expulsion from the point at which they entered the U.S.? Biden’s approach is not only more costly but it puts the migrants at risk. Once back in Mexico, they are prey for cartels and human traffickers. Biden and his administration want to promote the idea that their ideas are more humane than those of the Trump administration, which are described as “draconian”, yet that’s hard to understand when illegal migrants are moved around in a puzzling way. Organizations in El Paso, who were alerted to prepare for incoming migrants, are surprised.

As an editorial in Spectator USA observes, “If his party believes that mere poverty creates a valid asylum claim, that real borders are morally illegitimate, that minors must be admitted immediately, that families must never be separated and that ICE must be defanged or abolished, what can Biden do besides let everybody in? President Biden will have to find the courage to resist his own party’s new ideology, or the border crisis of his first months could turn into the defining problem of his entire presidency.”

Of course, it’s a crisis Joe’s handlers don’t want to go to waste. Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”

And it’s useful for socialist engineering as well: Former Trump administration senior adviser Stephen Miller: Biden’s Immigration Plan Would “Erase America’s Nationhood.”

And none dare protest:

Flashback: “Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser. Labour threw open Britain’s borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a ‘truly multicultural’ country, a former Government adviser has revealed.”