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Biden Cartel Corruption Elections Government Overreach Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Don’t you just love it when a awesome Federal Judge gives Special Prosecutor Smith a royal Bitch Slapping?

Don’t you just love it when a awesome Federal Judge gives Special Prosecutor Smith a royal Bitch Slapping? He’s in over his head and he knows it.

As Politico’s Kyle Cheney reported, Cannon struck down two of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s sealed filings in her ruling today. Cheney said she came out swinging.

Judge Cannon comes out swinging at special counsel this morning, striking two of prosecutors’ sealed filings and demanding an explanation of “the legal propriety of using an out-of-district grand jury proceeding to continue to investigate” the docs case.

The liberal media has claimed that Cannon revealed that an “out-of-district grand jury” is investigating the classified documents case. But Kelly notes it was Jack Smith who did this in a motion filed just last week.

The Gateway Pundit’s Cristina Laila previously reported that this is not the first time Jack Smith has been smacked down by Cannon. She had previously denied motions to keep the government’s motion government’s motion to keep a list of 84 witnesses under wraps.

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Faked news Links from other news sources. Science

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, no just another climate loon ignoring Science.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling, no just another climate loon ignoring Science. No my friends the world isn’t ending and glaciers will continue to break off just as they have since the beginning of time.

According to NewsBusters:

PBS producers ran soundbites of seven souls who claimed the fear of “climate change” had made them anxious about the future, including Mark Ikeda, who said: “Climate anxiety affects my daily life, by the decisions I make about when I want to go someplace or where I want to go or more [inaudible], how I want to travel.”

John Yang interviewed Leslie Davenport, who is a “climate psychology therapist.” She says,” We view distress, upset, sadness, grief, anger about climate change to be a really reasonable, even healthy reaction.” She referred to this field of psychology as “emerging.” One has to ask, is climate change even qualify as science?

 

WATCH:

Video and partial transcription courtesy of NewsBusters

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Corruption Links from other news sources. Medicine Progressive Racism Racism Reprints from others. WOKE Work Place

You make the call. Doctor Coalition Sues California Medical Board for Insisting ‘White Individuals Are Naturally Racist’.

You make the call. Doctor Coalition Sues California Medical Board for Insisting ‘White Individuals Are Naturally Racist’.

Two doctors, one black, and the other an Iranian-American, have sued the Medical Board of California for its requirement forcing a continuation of medical education courses that are focused on “implicit bias.”

Dr. Marilyn Singleton and Dr. Azadeh Khatibi argued that such a requirement violates their constitutional rights of freedom of speech and civil rights.

They said that such a requirement lacks evidence regarding its efficacy in the medical field and that the mandate is considered widely controversial among doctors.

Do No Harm, an organization that fights for individual patients and against identity politics, joined the doctors in opposing California’s mandate.

The lawsuit was filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a freedom-fighting organization, and challenges a mandate from California lawmakers that requires all medical courses to include “implicit bias” training.

“Physicians have free will and act in the best interest of their patients,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm’s chairman.

“The idea of unconscious bias states that one acts on those biases, and there’s no evidence of this happening in the medical community,” he added.

“Medical professionals take the Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and do not need lawmakers or medical organizations to tell them what they should think when providing medical advice to patients,” he continued.

The lawsuit points out that all state-licensed physicians must complete 50 hours of continuing medical education every two years.

It describes “implicit bias” as the “idea that medical professionals unconsciously treat patients differently based on their race or other immutable characteristics,” as reported by The Messenger.

In a Fox News Op-Ed, Singleton blasted the California law for what it truly is.

“While the law doesn’t say it, the accusation is clear: White people are oppressors and Black people are oppressed. Nationwide, implicit-bias trainings for medical professionals routinely discuss systemic racism, White supremacy, and other race-based attacks on classes of people,” she said.

“I don’t care that I’m not the target. This still represents the kind of racist thinking that was starting to fade 50 years ago. I don’t want to be taught this evil, nor do I want to teach it to others,” she added.

Singleton also said that medical professionals should focus on teaching medicine rather than pushing an agenda shared wholly by a political party.

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Commentary Corruption Crime Links from other news sources. Uncategorized WOKE

Who are the real Fascists? Socialism at it’s finest.

 

Historically-based policies of fascism included: socialized medicine, extremely high and complicated taxation (including “inflation tax”), centralization (anti-state rights), nationalization of education, massive welfare programs, mandatory labor union (German Labor Front), socialist economics, anti-gun rights, one-party rule, “social justice,” high government borrowing, censorship and suppression of the opposition, racism, anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-religion, price/wage/and rent controls, belligerent nationalism, anti-classical “liberalism.” And finally, they ruled by decree not legislative laws, disempowering local police in favor of a nationalized police force to oppose political opponents.

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., argued on talk radio that Democrats are the real fascists.

“If you look at what fascism is,” Brooks said, “it’s more government dictatorial control. That’s Democrats’ policies and positions hand in glove. It’s Democrats who are the ones to tend to be more fascist because fascism is the opposite of liberty and freedom, and the Democrats don’t trust us to make our own decisions. They believe the government should be doing it.”

 Fascists believe the opposition must be suppressed and that individual interests must give way for the perceived good of the nation and race.

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Credit Downgrade Means Bidenomics Just Got ‘Fitched’.

Credit Downgrade Means Bidenomics Just Got ‘Fitched’.

What happens when you “Fitch” your wagon to “Bidenomics”?

The American government gets its credit rating downgraded, and a big barrel of cold water gets dumped over the heads of Wall Street bulls.

That Fitch downgrade of U.S. Treasuries on Tuesday was pretty much the big news this week — along with a rather mixed jobs report.

But let’s stay with Fitch for a minute, or two, because it was the first big crack in the façade of Biden’s economic agenda.

No one really should have been shocked when top global ratings agency Fitch downgraded the U.S. government’s top credit rating from AAA to AA+ given the fiscal cliff that the Biden regime and a coalition of Democrats and RINO Republicans on Capitol Hill have sent us hurtling down with a series of irresponsible multitrillion dollar spending bills.

Yet, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen complained and the White House moaned and, of course, they incredulously blamed the Republicans.

The reality is this never should have happened.

Here, the globalist elites who run this country in Washington and from Wall Street ritually portray America as a fortress of democracy and as a bastion of financial security for the world.

It’s our birthright, they say, for credit agencies around the world to treat investments in U.S. government bonds as the safest investments in the most stable country of the world.

Yet, in the space of less than three years, Joe Biden has shaken the very foundation of our democratic system with his partisan assaults on President Trump and his advisers and election interference.

Indeed, Biden’s weaponization of the FBI and Department of Justice has reached such new lows that America now shares in common with Third World countries like Brazil and Pakistan this infamy:

The judiciaries in all three countries have, or are trying to prevent, Trump-like figures — Bolsonaro in Brazil, Khan in Pakistan, Trump himself in the United States — from ever running for president again.

To say that this threatens the stability of our country is to state the obvious.

At the same time, the economic policies of Joe Biden and a Uniparty Congress have sent us hurtling towards a massive fiscal cliff, the likes of which we have never seen in our history.

Here’s the fundamental conundrum facing this country that the Fitch downgrade fully exposes:

  • Government spending is out of control and will create unprecedented debt levels.
  • It will cost more and more to finance this hemorrhaging U.S. government debt.
  • It will cost more not just because the debt is growing — and growing far faster than tax revenues — but also because interest rates are rising.

Consider here that the average interest cost on debt is about two and a half percent. However, under Bidenomics, this average will roughly double as existing debt is rolled over and new debt must be financed.

As a practical matter, this rising interest cost burden will make it more and more difficult for the U.S. government to finance all of its various functions — from education, transportation, and defense to Social Security, Medicare, and border security (if we still have that).

Politically, of course, push must come to shove — inevitably, services must be cut or, more likely, taxes must be raised.

By one estimate, the U.S. government will have to raise all taxes by nearly 30% just to cover these rising interest costs.

But wait: Raising taxes will likely be a political non-starter.

So what’s the third option? Here’s the answer as well as the buried lead:

When Fitch downgrades treasury securities, the agency is not really worried about any kind of classic default on the bonds.

Rather, Fitch, along with the rest of us, know full well that the other way of financing all of this Bidenomics destruction besides the political difficult route of tax hikes will be for the government to simply print more money.

Of course, this government printing press will fuel inflation and thereby devalue any bonds that are currently being held — and that’s precisely the risk:

The risk is not one of default but rather that of the monetization of the debt in a way in which the real value of the debt and therefore the real value of the bonds will fall.

And lest anyone think that this could somehow turn out to be a good deal for America — solve our fiscal woes by screwing bondholders — just remember that this scenario comes with massive inflation which, the last time this writer looked, remains the “cruelest tax” hitting the working classes and those in the “Basket of Deplorables,” of this nation, the hardest.

House Republicans will of course have another swing at forcing the Democrats into fiscal responsibility but, thanks to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, it won’t come before the November presidential election in 2024.

In the meantime, Wall Street is at least starting to squirm as the reality of Bidenomics sinks in. Who will be left holding their portfolios when the bullish music stops?

Peter Navarro holds a Harvard Ph.D. in economics. One of only three senior White House officials to serve with Donald Trump from the 2016 campaign to the end, Peter was chief China Hawk and manufacturing czar. White House memoirs include “In Trump Time,” and “Taking Back Trump’s America.” His website is peternavarro.com 

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Commentary Corruption Crime Links from other news sources. Reprints from others.

Reedley Chinese COVID Lab Received Tax Credit of $360,000 From Gov. Newsom’s ‘GO-Biz’

Reedley Chinese COVID Lab Received Tax Credit of $360,000 From Gov. Newsom’s ‘GO-Biz’

At the epicenter of current controversy, an illegal California lab run by a Chinese biotech firm, Prestige Biotech, was recently discovered in a warehouse in Reedley, California. The lab contained mice which were genetically engineered to spread COVID-19.

According to National Review, “court documents further showed that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted tests on the more than 800 chemicals found at the site and that over 20 infectious agents were found present, including Hepatitis B and C, streptococcus pneumonia, chlamydia, rubella, and Herpes 1 and 5.” As a federal investigation is underway, where will the money trail lead us?

As recently discovered, Prestige Biotech is registered in the State of Nevada, but unlicensed to conduct business within the State of California. Code enforcement officials from the City of Reedley spoke to Xiuqin Yao, President of Prestige Biotech, as identified via emails and court documents. Ms. Yao informed authorities that the company was the largest creditor of Universal Meditech (UMI), Inc. which filed for bankruptcy. UMI had been relocated from the City of Fresno to the Reedley warehouse following an electrical fire, and when UMI ceased operations. According to NBC News, “Prestige Biotech was a creditor to UMI and identified as its successor, according to court documents.”

document released on March 24, 2019 by Governor Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development, a California Competes tax credit allocation agreement of $360,000 was cemented with UMI.

CDC conducted found more than 800 chemicals at the site and over 20 infectious agents

 

By Adina Flores,

 

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Commentary How sick is this? Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics Reprints from others.

Just putting this out there. The Obama Factor A Q&A with historian David Garrow.

Just putting this out there. The Obama Factor A Q&A with historian David Garrow.

There is a fascinating passage in Rising Star, David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama’s early years, in which the historian examines Obama’s account in Dreams from My Father of his breakup with his longtime Chicago girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism. As readers, we know that the stakes of this decision would become more than simply personal: The Black American man that Obama wills into being in this scene would go on to marry a Black woman from the South Side of Chicago named Michelle Robinson and, after a meteoric rise, win election as the first Black president of the United States.

 

Yet what Garrow documented, after tracking down and interviewing Sheila Miyoshi Jager, was an explosive fight over a very different subject. In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

 

At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

 

In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

 

No doubt, Obama’s evolving race-based self-consciousness did distance him from Jager; in the end, the couple broke up. Yet it is revealing to read Obama’s account of the breakup in Dreams against the very different account that Jager offers. In Obama’s account, he was the particularist, embracing a personal meaning for the Black experience that Jager, the universalist, refused to grant. In Jager’s account, the poles of the argument are nearly, but not quite, reversed: It is Obama who appears to minimize Jewish anxiety about blood libels coming from the Black community. His particularism mattered; hers didn’t. While Obama defined himself as a realist or pragmatist, the episode reads like a textbook evasion of moral responsibility.

 

Whose version of the story is correct? Who knows. The bridge between the two accounts is Obama’s emerging attachment to Blackness, which required him to fall in love with and marry a Black woman. In Obama’s account, his attachment to Blackness is truthful and noble. In Jager’s account, his claims are instrumental and selfish; he grants particularism to the experience and suffering of his own tribe while denying it to others.

 

In evaluating the truthfulness of these two competing accounts, it seems worth noting that Jager is something more than a woman scorned by a man who would later become president of the United States. Obama asked her to marry him twice; she refused him both times, before going on to achieve her own high-level professional successes. A student of the great University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, Jager is a professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin College whose scholarship on great power politics in Southeast Asia and the U.S.-Korean relationship is known for its factual rigor. In contrast, Dreams from My Father, as Garrow shows throughout Rising Star, is as much a work of dreamy literary fiction as it is an attempt to document Obama’s early life.

 

Scholarship aside, there is another reason to assume that Jager would be less likely to misremember an incident involving race and antisemitism than Obama. As it turns out, Jager’s paternal grandparents, Hendrik and Geesje Jager, were members of the Dutch resistance, whose role sheltering a Jewish child named Greetje in their home for three years led to their recognition as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. In that context, at least, it seems quite likely that Jager would remember the particulars of a fight with Obama related to antisemitism, and be turned off by his response—while Obama’s version of the fight has the feel of an anecdote positioned, if not invented, to buttress the character arc of the protagonist of his memoir, which positioned him for a career in public life.

 

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jager’s account of her fight with Obama, though, is that not one reporter in America bothered to interview her before David Garrow found her, near the end of Obama’s presidency. As Obama’s live-in girlfriend and closest friend during the 1980s, Jager is probably the single most informed and credible source about the inner life of a young man whose election was accompanied by hopes of sweeping, peaceful social change in America—a hope that ended with the election of Donald Trump, or perhaps midway through Obama’s second term, as the president focused on the Iran deal while failing to address the concerns about rampant income inequality, racial inequality, and the growth of a monopoly tech complex that happened on his watch.

 

The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager—or never knew who she was—defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in Dreams had been defined—by Obama—as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny. Indeed, Garrow’s biography of Obama’s early years is filled with such corrections of a historical record that Obama more or less invented himself. Based on years of careful record-searching and patient interviewing, Rising Star highlights a remarkable lack of curiosity on the part of mainstream reporters and institutions about a man who almost instantaneously was treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.

 

Yet when it came out six years ago, Rising Star was mostly ignored; as a result, its most scandalous and perhaps revelatory passages, such as Obama’s long letter to another girlfriend about his fantasies of having sex with men, read today, to people who are more familiar with the Obama myth than the historical record, like partisan bigotry. But David Garrow is hardly a hack whose work can or should be dismissed on partisan grounds. He is among the country’s most credible and celebrated civil rights historians—the author of The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bearing the Cross (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography) and one of the three historian-consultants who animated the monumental PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize, as well as the author of a landmark history of abortion rights, Liberty and Sexuality.

 

In part, Garrow’s failure to gain a hearing for his revision of the Obama myth lay in his timing. Rising Star felt like old news the moment it was published in May 2017—as whatever insights the book contained were overtaken by the fury and chaos surrounding the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency. As Trump’s incendiary carnival barker act took center stage, it was hard even for Republicans not to miss the contrast with Obama’s cerebral mannerisms and sedate family life. The idea that Obama was simply another self-obsessed political knife-fighter who played fast and loose with the truth didn’t resonate. In any case, Obama was now a footnote to history—a reminder of kinder, gentler times that the country seemed unlikely to see again anytime soon.

 

Yet there was also evidence to suggest that the idea Obama was no longer concerned with power or involved with power was itself part of a new set of myths being woven by and around the ex-president. First, the Obamas never left town. Instead, they bought a large brick mansion in the center of Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood—violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes. In the Obamas case, the reason for staying in D.C. was ostensibly that their youngest daughter, Sasha, wanted to finish high school with her class at Sidwell Friends. In June 2019, Sasha went off to college, yet her parents remained in Washington.

 

By then, it was clear to any informed observer that the Obamas’ continuing presence in the nation’s capital was not purely a personal matter. To an extent that has never been meaningfully reported on, the Obamas served as both the symbolic and practical heads of the Democratic Party shadow government that “resisted” Trump—another phenomenon that defied prior norms. The fact that these were not normal times could be adduced by even a passing glance at the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers, which were filled with claims that the 2016 election had been “stolen” by Russia and that Trump was a Russian agent.

 

Given the stakes, then, it seemed churlish to object to the Obamas’ quiet family life in Kalorama —or to report on the comings and goings of Democratic political operatives and office-seekers from their mansion, or to the swift substitution of Obama as party leader for Hillary Clinton, who after all was the person who had supposedly been cheated out of the presidency. Why even mention the strangeness of the overall setup, which surely paled next to the raw menace of Donald Trump, who lurched from one crisis to the next while lashing out at his enemies and probably selling out the country to Vladimir Putin?

 

In a normal country, the exhaustive report issued in April 2019 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which uncovered no evidence that the 2016 election had been decided by Russian actions, let alone that Trump was a Russian agent, might have been a cue for the Obamas to go home, to Chicago, or Hawaii, or Martha’s Vineyard. The moment of crisis was over. Russiagate turned out to have been a politically motivated hoax, just as Trump had long insisted.

 

But while the attention of Republicans in Washington turned to questioning the FBI, more careful observers could not fail to notice that the FBI had hardly acted alone. After all, Russiagate had not originated with the Bureau, but with the Clinton campaign, which having failed to get even sympathetic mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post to bite on its fantastical allegations, was reduced to handing off the story to campaign press apparatchiks like Slate’s Franklin Foer and Mother Jones’ David Corn. The fact that the story only got bigger after Clinton lost the election was due to Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, who in November and December of 2016 helped elevate Russiagate from a failed Clinton campaign ploy to a priority of the American national security apparatus, using a hand-picked team of CIA analysts under his direct control to validate his thesis. If Brennan was the instrument, the person who signed the executive order that turned Brennan’s thesis into a time bomb under Trump’s desk was Barack Obama.

 

The election of Joe Biden in 2020 gave the Obamas even more reasons to stay in town. The whispers about Biden’s cognitive decline, which began during his bizarre COVID-sheltered basement campaign, were mostly dismissed as partisan attacks on a politician who had always been gaffe-ridden. Yet as President Biden continued to fall off bicycles, misremember basic names and facts, and mix long and increasingly weird passages of Dada-edque nonsense with autobiographical whoppers during his public appearances, it became hard not to wonder how poor the president’s capacities really were and who was actually making decisions in a White House staffed top to bottom with core Obama loyalists. When Obama turned up at the White House, staffers and the press crowded around him, leaving President Biden talking to the drapes—which is not a metaphor but a real thing that happened.

 

That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.

 

David Garrow

David Garrow

TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY LLC/ALAMY

 

Instead, every few months a sanitized report appears on some aspect of the ex-president’s outside public advocacy, presented within limits that are clearly being set by Obama’s political operatives—which conveniently elide the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making. Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.

 

There is another interpretation of Obama’s post-presidency, of course—one shared by many Republicans and Democrats. In that interpretation, Obama was never the leader of much of anything, neither during the Trump years nor now. Instead, he was focused on buying trophy propertieshanging out with billionaires, and vacationing on private yachts while grifting large checks from marks like Spotify and Netflix—even if his now-stratospheric levels of personal vanity also demanded that every so often he show up President Biden for the sin of occupying his chair in the White House. 

 

In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.

 

Yet the answer is, I believe, somewhere in David Garrow’s book.

 

At bottom, Rising Star is a tragic story about a young man who was deeply wounded by the abandonment of both his white mother and his Black father—a wound that gifted him with political genius and at the same time made him the victim of a profound narcissism that first whispered to him in his mid-twenties that he was destined to be president. It is not hard to see how Garrow has come to believe that Obama’s ambition proved to be toxic, both for the man and for the country. But why?

 

As a human being who was sentient for long stretches of time between 2008 and 2017, I was, in general, a fan of Barack Obama and his presidency. What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. Even as president, Obama insisted on poking exceptionalists in the eye, saying that he believed in American exceptionalism “just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?

 

What made Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism seem particularly weird to me was his attachment to Abraham Lincoln, whose cadences and economy of language he urged his speechwriters to emulate. As a historian, one might plausibly argue that Lincoln was a saint who saved the Union or a monster who shed rivers of blood—or that he didn’t go far enough. But there is no arguing with Lincoln’s belief in the uniqueness of the American destiny, for which he sent hundreds of thousands of young men to die. Of all men, Abraham Lincoln would have been baffled by an American president who denied that America was exceptional. What did all those people die for, then? And what exactly did Obama think that Lincoln’s speeches were about?

 

 

 

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Biden Cartel Corruption Crime How funny is this? Just my own thoughts Links from other news sources. Opinion Politics The Courts

Quick hide your children Progressives claim Trumps out to kill all who get in his way.

Quick hide your children Progressives claim Trumps out to kill all who get in his way. Former President Trump made a statement that.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”  Well, the fanatics on the left are in fear. Some maybe even went into hiding. According to Jackie Boy the statement was a threat of violence against the witnesses and Smith and his crackerjack team.

The judge bought the lie and now wants a response from Trump as to what he meant. My first thought was to tell the judge to rotate on it. But seriously this will be a long string of complaints that will be filed.

Under the process known as discovery, prosecutors are required to provide defendants with the evidence against them so they can prepare their defense.

“It could have a harmful chilling effect on witnesses or adversely affect the fair administration of justice in this case,” prosecutors wrote in their filing, adding Trump has a history of attacking judges, attorneys and witnesses in other cases against him.

At his arraignment on Thursday, Trump swore not to intimidate witnesses or communicate with them without legal counsel present.

Protective orders are routine in cases involving confidential documents, but prosecutors said it was particularly important to restrict public dissemination given Trump’s social media statements.

A Trump spokesperson issued a statement defending the former president’s social media post.

“The Truth post cited is the definition of political speech, and was in response to the Rino, China-loving, dishonest special interest groups and super PAC’s,” the statement said.

 

 

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Abortion rights? Emotional abuse How sick is this? Leftist Virtue(!) Media Woke Politics Progressive Racism Reprints from others. The Courts The Law Transgender WOKE

“Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes of the 1960s South” Leftist publication whines.

This article comes from the “BuzzLoving.com” website and is written by a Trump-hating leftist calling itself “Milla” — you can see all 81 pages of articles it’s written by going HERE.

“Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes of the 1960s South” – US Supreme Court strikes blow against LGBTQ+ rights.

–Original Article headline

Before I get into the article proper, let me state my personal opinion to the rainbow community at large.

You have the right to be whatever you chose to be. Just like I have the right to be myself. You DON’T have the right to demand that I think your way and kowtow to your fantasies on penalty of being beaten, killed or labeled a bigot, a Nazi, or any other derogatory term you come up with. I don’t have the right to sue you for being what you chose to be, but you don’t have the right to try to enforce your fantasies on me via a lawsuit, either. You respect me, I’ll respect you, even if we don’t agree on life choices. Simple. That’s the way a mature person behaves.
End of disclaimer.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of an evangelical Christian web designer from Colorado who refused to work on invites for same-sex marriage, giving a significant blow to the rights of LGBTQ couples.

The Supreme Court cited free speech.

Evangelical Christian web designer Lorie Smith has a free speech right under the Constitution’s First Amendment to decline to endorse messages she disagrees with, it has been decided. This one decision could cause other owners of similar creative businesses to evade penalties under laws in 29 states that defend the rights of the LGBTQ community. (Notice the defendant is a biological woman. –TPR)

The statement from the Justice

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, “The First Amendment envisions the United States as a rich and complex place, where all persons are free to think and speak as they wish, not as the government demands.” He added, “At the same time, this court has also recognized that no public accommodation law is immune from the demands of the Constitution. In particular, this court has held public accommodations statutes can sweep too broadly when deployed to compel speech.”

Shutterstock photo

Smith sued on hypothetical grounds.

Smith opposes same-sex marriage on religious grounds and sued the state in 2016 because she said she would like to accept customers planning opposite-sex weddings but reject requests made by same-sex couples. She was never disciplined for declining a same-sex couple, and it’s unclear if she ever did. Instead, she sued on hypothetical grounds.

(THIS IS NOT “HYPOTHETICAL” Colorado anyone? And the author’s painfully obvious bias is on full display here. –TPR)

Smith celebrated, but many expressed worry and dread.

(How many is “many” there, cupcake? — TPR)

“This is a victory not just for me but for all of us; whether you share my beliefs or completely disagree with them, free speech is for everyone,” Smith told the press. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that this was a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities” and a type of “reactionary exclusion,” calling it “heartbreaking.”

“Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes.”

Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Harry Litman shared that this was a major blow to human rights, writing, “Return to the ‘whites-only’ luncheonettes of the 1960s South & posit that the owners attest that they have sincere religious beliefs, reinforced by their pastor every Sunday, that Blacks are inferior and that serving them would force them to endorse a message they disagree with..” Litman added, “That’s where we are headed.”

(Oh oh, Not kowtowing is “racist” now, is it? *facepalm*– TPR)

“The opinion is out there like a loaded gun.”

The lawyer also clarified, “To be clear, I’m not saying that’s where we are headed, although to paraphrase Justice Jackson, the opinion is out there like a loaded gun for someone who wants to go that way. The point for today is just that the opinion doesn’t have a limiting principle that forecloses that result.”

(Bloviate much? Oh, I forgot, you’re not only a person with a law degree, but you’re also a bureaucrat. Silly me. –TPR)

Another important takeaway

Time wrote, “Put plainly: states can try to pass local anti-bigotry laws, but national religious liberties still supersede them.” The publication also connected how the ruling came a year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, and Court watchers predicted that things would only get worse for women as well as LGBTQ rights.

(“For women?” Really. Sorry, that just won’t wash. Maybe for those females who are still emotional babies, but not for anyone who accepts the responsibility for their own actions. –TPR)

 

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FDA Head Robert Califf Battles Misinformation — Sometimes.

 

This is a clown who served during the Obama administration. Thought the job was all fun and games. Much of this article is Government misinformation. But there are parts that they get right. Come 2024 all these clowns that took part in the attacks on our young and elderly will be gone or in jail.

FDA Head Robert Califf Battles Misinformation — Sometimes.

Robert Califf, MD, the head of the FDA, doesn’t seem to be having fun on the job.

“I would describe this year as hand-to-hand combat. Really, every day,” he said at an academic conference at Stanford in April. It’s a sentiment the FDA commissioner has expressed often.

What’s been getting Califf’s goat? Misinformation, which gets part of the blame for Americans’ stagnating life expectancy. To Califf, the country that invents many of the most advanced drugs and devices is terrible at using those technologies well. And one reason for that is Americans’ misinformed choices, he has suggested. Many don’t use statins, vaccines, or COVID-19 therapies. Many choose to smoke cigarettes and eat the wrong food.

Califf and the FDA are fighting misinformation head-on. “The misinformation machine is really causing a lot of death,” he said, in an apparent ad-lib, this spring in a speech at Tufts University. The pandemic, he told KFF Health News, helped “crystallize” his need to tackle misinformation. It was a “blatant case,” in which multiple studies gave evidence about very effective therapeutics against COVID. “And a lot of people chose not to do it.” There were “large-scale purveyors of misinformation,” he said, poisoning the well.

Occasionally, though, Califf and the FDA have added to the cacophony of misinformation. And sometimes their misinformation is about misinformation.

Califf hasn’t been able to consistently estimate misinformation’s public health toll. Last June, he said it was the “leading cause of meaningful life-years lost.” In the fall, he told a conferenceopens in a new tab or window: “I’ve been going around saying that misinformation is the most common cause of death in the United States.” He continued, “There is no way to prove that, but I do believe that it is.”

 

At other times, as in April, he has called the problem the nation’s “leading cause” of premature death. “I’ll keep working on this to try and get it right,” he said. Later, in May, he said, “Many Americans die or experience serious illness every year due to bad choices driven by false or misleading information.”

Americans’ health is indeed in dire straits. The CDC noted the country’s life expectancy has dropped 2 years in a rowopens in a new tab or window — it’s at 76.1 years as of 2021 — a dismal capper to 4 decadesopens in a new tab or window of lagging gains. Countries such as Slovenia, Greece, and Costa Rica outrank the U.S. Their newborn citizens are expected to live more than 80 yearsopens in a new tab or window, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Several factors are at the root of those differences. But Americans’ choices, often informed by bad or misleading data, political jeremiads, or profit-seeking advertising, are among the causes. For instance, one 2023 paper estimated that undervaccination against COVID — caused in part by misinformation — costs as much as $300 million per dayopens in a new tab or window, accounting for both the costs of healthcare and economic costs, like missed work.

Outside experts are sympathetic. Misinformation is a “huge problem for public health,” said Joshua Sharfstein, MD, a Johns Hopkins University public health professor and former FDA principal deputy commissioner. Having a strategy to combat it is crucial. But, he cautioned, “that’s the easiest part of this.”

The agency, which regulates products that consumers spend 20 cents of each dollar on per year, is putting more muscle behind the effort. It’s begun mentioning the subject of misinformation in its procurement requests, like one discussing the needopens in a new tab or window to monitor social media for misinformation related to cannabis.

The agency launched a “Rumor Control” pageopens in a new tab or window seeking to debunk persistent confusion. It also expects to get a report from the Reagan-Udall Foundationopens in a new tab or window, a not-for-profit organization created by Congress to advise the FDA. Califf has said he thinks better regulation — and more authorityopens in a new tab or window for the agency — would help.

Califf has noted small victories. Ivermectin, once touted as a COVID wonder drug, “eventually” became one such win. But, then again, its use is “not completely gone,” he said. And, despite winning individual battles, his optimism is muted: “I’d say right now the trend in the war is in a negative direction.”

Some of those battles have been quite small, even marginal.

And it’s difficult to know what to take on or respond to, Califf said. “I think we’re just in the early days of being able to do that,” he told KFF Health News. “It’s very hard to be scientific,” he said.

Take the agency’s experience last fall with “NyQuil chicken” — a purportedly viral cooking trend in which users roasted their birds in the over-the-counter cold medicine on social media platforms like TikTok.

Califf said his agency’s “skeleton crew” — at least relative to Big Tech giants — had picked up on increasing chatter about the meme.

But independent analyses don’t corroborate the claim. It seems much of the interest in it came only after the FDA called attention to it. The day before the agency’s pronouncement, the TikTok app recorded only five searches on the topic, BuzzFeed News found in an analysis of TikTok dataopens in a new tab or window. That tally surged to 7,000 the week after the agency’s declaration. Google Trends, which measures changes in the number of searches, shows a similar pattern: Interest peaked on the search engine in the week after the agency announcement.

Califf also claimed “injuries” occurred to participants “directly” due to the social media trend. Now, he said, “the number of injuries is down,” though he couldn’t say whether the agency’s intervention was the cause.

Again, his assertions have fuzzy underpinnings. It’s not clear what, if any, actual damage the NyQuil chicken fad caused. Poison control centers don’t keep that data, said Maggie Maloney, a spokesperson for America’s Poison Centers. And, after multiple requests, agency spokespeople declined to provide the FDA’s data reflecting increased social media traffic or injuries stemming from the meme.

In countering misinformation, FDA also risks coming off as high-handed. In September 2021, the agency tweeted about purported mythsopens in a new tab or window and misinformation on mammograms. Among the myths? That they’re painfulopens in a new tab or window. Instead, the agency explained that “everyone’s pain threshold is different” and the breast cancer-screening procedure is more often described as “temporary discomfort.”

Statements like these “erode trust,” said Lisa Fitzpatrick, MD, MPH, MPA, an infectious diseases physician and currently the CEO of Grapevine Health, a startup trying to improve health literacy in underserved communities. Fitzpatrick has previously served as an official with the District of Columbia’s Medicaid program and with the CDC.

“Who are you to judge what’s painful?” she asked, rhetorically. It’s hard to brand subjective impressions as misinformation.

Califf acknowledged the point. Speaking to 340 million Americans is difficult. With mammograms, the average patient might not have a painful experience — but many might. “Getting across that kind of nuance and public communication, I think, is in its early phases.”

Scrutiny over the agency’s role regarding food and nutrition is also mounting. After independent journalist Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote an article criticizing the agency for relying on voluntary reporting standards for baby formula, Califf tweeted to correctopens in a new tab or window a “bit of misinformation,” saying the agency did not have such authority.

An agency communications specialist made a similar intervention with New York University professor Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, referring to a “troubling pattern of articles with erroneous information that then get amplified.” The agency was again seeking to rebut arguments that the agency had erred in not seeking mandatory reporting.

“As I see it, the ‘troubling pattern’ here is FDA’s responses to advocates like me who want to support this agency’s role in making sure food companies in general — and infant formula companies in particular — do not produce unsafe food,” Nestle retortedopens in a new tab or window. Notwithstanding the agency’s protests to Evich and Nestle, the agency had only recently asked for such authority.

Efforts to respond to or regulate misinformation are becoming a political problem.

In July, a federal judge issued a sweeping, yet temporary, injunctionopens in a new tab or window — at the instigation of Republican attorneys general, multiple right-wing political groups, and prominent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense — barring federal health officials from contacting social media groups to correct information. A large section of the ruling detailed efforts by a CDC official to push back on suspected misinformation on social media networks.

An appeals court later issuedopens in a new tab or window its own temporary ruling — this time countering the original, sweeping order — nevertheless underscoring the extent of pushback on government pushback against misinformation. Califf has consistently played down the government’s ability to solve the problem. “One hundred percent of experts agree, government cannot solve this. We have too much distrust in fundamental institutions,” he said last June.

 A photo of Robert Califf, MD