ARE YOU READY FOR SOME GOOD NEWS? Issues & Insights takes a look at the latest Covid data and notices something VIP that isn’t being reported much elsewhere. So, no more fear porn, okay Mainstream Media???

HOW ESTABLISHMENT GOP MONEY FUNDED ABORTION PILL EFFORT: The Washington Free Beacon headline this morning on Collin Anderson’s illuminating story on how the recent abortion pill approval by the FDA came about emphasizes the link to population control. But there’s much more to this story.

At the center of the beaucoup money that fueled the successful campaign by the usual assortment of liberal foundations and activists was the fortune left behind by David Packard, once a giant of the Republican Establishment. Packard viewed population control as Job #1 for his foundation. His kids and grandkids took that mandate as a justification for spending huge chunks of the Packard fortune on abortion.

“Those expenditures have allowed Packard’s successors to deliver significant victories in furthering the late billionaire’s anti-natalist agenda. Take, for example, the Food and Drug Administration’s December decision to ease the process for getting a chemical abortion pill,” Anderson writes.

“The Packard Foundation played a central role in the deregulation fight, funneling millions to liberal advocacy groups that spearheaded the legal and political push to remove the FDA’s abortion pill barriers. The foundation meanwhile invested millions of dollars into GenBioPro, the only company that makes a generic form of the abortion drug.”

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: The Daily Gouge Thom McKee’s conclusion to a bracing assessment of how the U.S. government’s response to Covid has been flawed from the beginning ends on a slightly upbeat note:

“After two years of this exhausting disaster, it does finally seem as if the light is appearing through the dark fog. We are slouching our way to endemicity. Over time, too, the wisdom and reasonableness of the Great Barrington Declaration will be widely granted. Not yet but in time.

“It’s too bad that we aren’t hearing apologies. We aren’t hearing people admit that they were wrong. We are seeing none of these experts who said they would give us a Covid-free world if we just let them control our lives and take our liberties. I do think such apologies right now would take the country and the world a long way down the path to healing.

“What we have instead is a traumatized people who wonder what the heck hit them for the last two years. It’s bad enough to deal with a nasty virus. It’s far worse to deal with the sudden end of the stream of life as we know it and then have nothing to show for it.

“Trust is gone and will stay that way for a very long time. The longer the experts who did this to the world refuse to acknowledge and admit their failure, the longer the healing will take.”

Well worth reading McKee’s analysis from start to finish.

NEW YORK NOW A COMPLETELY CONSTITUTION-FREE ZONE: How else to explain that officials in Gotham and Albany are using ethnicity as a key factor in determining who gets certain Coronavirus treatments and who doesn’t. Hans Bader has more.

BEST COVID QUESTION EVER: Christopher Bedford asks it at The Federalist and his answer holds the key to ending the “New Normal” of Covid Mandates/Dr.FaucChi/Where’s Your Mask?

Bedford observes:

“It’s like we’re not experiencing this bug ourselves; like we’re incapable of observing it in our friends and families, and seeing what it does. It’s like we trust the ‘experts’ more than we trust ourselves; damn our eyes.

“But if we dare take a step back and process the very thing we’re told we’re living through, we might recognize – more than ever – the increasingly obvious truth that COVID is a construct: a word we’ve been trained to fear more than the disease itself.”

BRILLIANT SCIENTIST, PROLIFIC INVENTOR, THRIVING ENTREPRENEUR: But, as admirable as are those three characteristics of Dr. James Tour of Rice University, there is something else, something totally unexpected, that marks him as someone uniquely worth listening to. Check it out here on HillFaith today.

TWITTER PERMANENTLY BANS M.D. WHO IS MANDATE CRITIC: Twitter’s censorship axe fell on Dr. Robert Malone today. “The thought police said ‘looks like you have too much to think.'”

WHY IS COVID RAGING IN BLUE STATES? That is a great question and Eddie Scarry of The Federalist is quite prepared to offer some sensible answers.

FIVE BRAVEST JOURNALISTS OF 2021: Wait a minute! Before you get your panties in a wad because “journalists” and “bravest” are two words that for good reason are rarely are seen together in a serious sentence, understand that Rich Cromwell has his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek.

FAUCI’S BIG, FAT PENSION WILL MAKE HISTORY: Leave it to Adam Andrzejewski and OpenTheBooks.com to expose the fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s annual pension would reach nearly $350,000 if he retires at the end of 2021 after 56 years of bureaucratic service. And that doesn’t include an annuity he would also get worth more than $8,000 annually.

JAN 6 PROTESTOR STRUCK 40 TIMES BY CAPITOL POLICE: Newly released video shows a Minnesota woman getting a beating, with a baton and fists, by a Capitol Hill Police officer. Her lawyer calls for a special prosecutor. I know lots of Capitol Hill Police officers who are dedicated, honorable professional law enforcement personnel. But there’s clearly some rotten apples.

‘FLABBERGASTING PARADOX:’ That’s what triple-dimension physics PhD Michael Guillen — and former Harvard professor and ABC News Science Editor — calls the Quantum Vacuum (QV) that is simultaneously nothing and potentially everything.

Guillen explains the role of the QV in his journey to writing “Believing is Seeing,” the one book you should read if you only read one in 2022. Be sure and buy it from Amazon, so Instapundit benefits. This excerpt on HillFaith should do the trick for all who love science and who love faith.

BUT APPARENTLY DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CAN: At least walk away from responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and emails it receives on its Free Speech Hotline, according to Liberty Unyielding’s Hans Bader.

COLLEGE CAN’T JUST WALK AWAY FROM FREE SPEECH CASE: A federal district court judge in Atlanta said Gwinnett College can’t just pay $2 in nominal damages and be free of litigation in which officials were found to have violated students’ right to share their religious views on campus without prior permission.

‘BLIND, PITILESS INDIFFERENCE’ OR DESIGN: That’s how Dr. Stephen Meyer frames the debate in an excellent Prager U video between scientific atheists like Richard Dawkins and himself, an advocate for the Intelligent Design school.

NO, US IS NOT SPLIT ON MANDATES: Latest Issues & Insights/TIPP Poll finds surprising agreement across the ideological spectrum regarding mandates. But the one exception — Republicans aren’t so sure about vaccine mandates — points up a major failing of the Mainstream Media’s Covid reporting:

“That, among all parties and ideologies, there is majority agreement on the effectiveness of the policies that have been pursued so far to deal with the spread of COVID-19 and its growing number of genetic variants.

“The agreement varies only by degree. Significant numbers of people on the right and the center have reasonable objections to COVID policies, such as mandatory vaccines for children, that politicians would be wise to heed.

“Indeed, of all the political groupings tracked by I&I/TIPP, the only groups that show virtually no objection to the most draconian masking, vaccination, and lockdown policies are the Democrats and their ideological kin, the liberals.

“Ironically, those same groups were strongly anti-vaccination when President Trump made his big push in 2020, but today with both the White House and Congress controlled by liberal Democrats, are the strongest proponents of sweeping government anti-COVID measures, including lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

“Unfortunately, this overarching majority agreement is muted or ignored by the mainstream media, which from the beginning has politicized the government’s COVID-19 response.”

HERE’S WHAT THE MSM DIDN’T TELL YOU ABOUT BISHOP TUTU: Jeff Dunetz at The Lid exposes the virulent anti-semitism that darkens Tutu’s life and career and that nobody in the Mainstream Media has the guts to acknowledge.

FORMER PRINCETON HISTORIAN SAYS SCHOOL LEFT HIM TO ROT IN PRISON: An Iranian prison that is, according to Xiyue Wang, who was encouraged by the Ivy League school’s powers-that-be to study for his doctorate in Tehran. He did and things went seriously bad thereafter.

“In a lawsuit filed last month, Wang accuses Princeton of trying to keep his wife from publicizing his case following his arrest in order to protect its reputation and to maintain political ties in Iran,” reports the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross in the first media coverage anywhere of the litigation.

“Wang blasted Princeton and its Iran Center for heeding the advice of  “pro-regime activists and academics” before and after his arrest. Wang alleges that Princeton lawyers and administrators urged him not to seek refuge in the Swiss embassy in Tehran after he began to fear for his safety,” Ross writes.

BIFF DIDDLE’S YEAR-END REVIEW: You don’t want to miss this one!

ABOUT THAT CHEVY ‘HOLIDAY RIDE’ TEAR-JERKER: It certainly brought forth some tears for me. And I am pretty sure I am not alone in this crowd.

THE REALLY, REALLY BIG QUESTION: So why is there something rather than nothing? Dr. Stephen Meyer says there are three possible answers: Aliens brought life to Earth, we’re just one in the multiverses, or there’s a fine tuner. And you say?

CHRISTIANITY BIRTHED MODERN SCIENCE: Speaking of Stephen C. Meyer and the Webb telescope, he’s also up on a new Prager U video explaining how modern science was encouraged by Christianity and many of the most famous scientists, including those of the present era, were and are believers.

DID YOU KNOW NASA LAUNCHES A TELESCOPE TODAY THAT CAN SEE YESTERDAY? Stephen C. Meyer says the James Webb is bigger, more maneuverable and more powerful than the Hubble telescope, and it can detect infrared light emitted by stars formed shortly after (relatively speaking) the Big Bang.

But don’t expect to hear much about this in the Mainstream Media because the Webb telescope won’t do anything about the Omicron variant.

YES, THEY ARE LISTENING: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was speaking at the Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Arizona when suddenly, none other than Siri interrupted, reports Jeff Dunetz on The Lid. Cruz just happened to be speaking about the need to force Big Tech out of the censorship business.

POWERS BIG CAYMAN OOPS: Alana Goodman and Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon dug into Samantha Powers’ financial disclosures as His Fraudulency’s USAID Administrator. And look what they found:

“Power lowballed the amount she held in a Cayman Islands-based investment fund by nearly $1 million. She said she held a stake in the fund valued between $50,000 and $100,000, according to a copy of her financial disclosure report filed in February ahead of her Senate confirmation and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

“But when she sold off the holding in June, as required by a federal ethics agreement, Power listed the sale as between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000—at least 10 times higher than the value four months before, according to the American Accountability Foundation watchdog group, which filed the ethics complaint.”

As chief of USAID, Powers has tremendous influence on the distribution of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, grants, program participation and training. What else might be found as investigators dig deeper?